CFX

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This article refers to the computer software application. For the confraternity of Catholic consecrated men, see Xaverian Brothers.

CFX is a commercial Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) program used to simulate fluid flow in a wide variety of applications. CFX allows engineers to test systems in a virtual environment. It has been applied to the simulation of water flowing past ship hulls, gas turbine engines (including the compressors, combustion chamber, turbines and afterburners), aircraft aerodynamics, pumps, fans, HVAC systems, mixing vessels, hydrocyclones, vacuum cleaners, and more. Pretty much anything that involves fluid flow can be simulated, if you have the expertise and computing power. Regarding computing power, CFX can give any cluster a run for its money. It is highly scalable and has been shown to maintain nearly linear scalablity to as many as 500 processors.

[edit] History

ANSYS CFX, as it is now known, has its roots in the program CFX-4, formerly Flow3D in the UK and originally developed in-house for use by the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (AEA), and TASCflow which was developed by Advanced Scientific Computing (ASC), of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.

FLOW3D was commercialized by AEA in the late eighties and early nineties, based on other in-house codes. It was renamed as CFX-4 in the mid-nineties, since the Flow3D name was already used in North America. The original product offering was based on a multi-block structured hexahedral code based on the SIMPLE staggered grid solution technique. CFX-4 was very strong in the chemical process industry and included some of the industries most advanced multiphase and chemistry models.

TASCflow was a structured hexahedral grid code, with a co-located primitive variable formulation that utilized a control volume based finite volume discretization scheme to create a linearized system of equations that was solved using a unique, highly effective proprietary coupled-multigrid solver. The Waterloo office has maintained strong ties with the University of Waterloo and its initial, highly academic focus led to the development of advanced discretization methods and solution algorithms. TASCflow was primarily used for mechanical applications, with modeling strengths in combustion and turbomachinery where the coupled solver delivered the simultaneous coupled .

In the mid 1990's, AEA began development of an unstructured version of their solver. AEA Technology was spun-off from the Atomic Energy Authority, to the public in the fall of 1996, after which the newly formed AEA Technology company began making acquisitions to grow the business. The Engineering Software Business of AEA Technology, acquired ASC in February 1997. ASC had also been developing an unstructured version of TASCflow, TASCflow for CAD, that utilized tetrahedral, prism, hexaderal and pyramid elements. CFX-5.3 was the first release of the combined code, using ASC's unstructured solver technology combined with AEAT's physics pre-processor, CFX-Build, and multiphase technology.

After the initial growing pains from the 1997 acquisition subsided, CFX-5 has evolved to become a strong competitor in the CFD market, with significant capability being added in a very short period of time. By 2003, CFX-5 had eclipsed the capabilities of the legacy codes, CFX-4 and CFX-TASCflow, and these are no longer in active development. Also in February 2003, just prior to the release of CFX-5.6, ANSYS, Inc. of Canonsburg, PA, acquired the CFX division from AEA Technology, which was in the process of divesting its engineering software division.

ANSYS CFX has continued to develop strongly under ANSYS, Inc. It has shed the '-5' from its name and the CFX-Build pre-processor has been replaced with a combination DesignModeler, CFX and ICEM CFD meshing technology. It has been applied to the design of everything from ship hulls to afterburners and continues to push the boundaries of CFD simulation. In recent releases, ANSYS has added the ability to couple the fluid dynamics simulations of ANSYS CFX software to its ANSYS mechanical simulations, allowing engineers to explore the interaction of fluids and solids in ways that were only dreamt of less than a decade ago.

On 16 February 2006 ANSYS acquired Fluent, Inc., the leading general purpose commercial CFD code and competitor to CFX.