Introduction to Ansys

Background of Ansys

Ansys has been founded in 1970 and incorporated in 1994. Ansys predominantly offers engineering simulation software and ancillary services. The solutions provided by the company are used in a wide range of industries including aerospace, defence, automotive, biomedical and other industrial sectors. Ansys has been recognized as one of the world's most innovative companies by prestigious publications such as Bloomberg Businessweek and FORTUNE magazine for its engineering simulation software. Leveraging the power of today's Desktop, Ansys provides a common platform for product development, from design concept to final-stage testing and validation. The company's product portfolio consists of simulation platform offerings that are used in diverse multi-physics fields like heat transfer, fluid mechanics, statics, solid mechanics, etc. However, Ansys is best known for finite element analysis (FEA), which has gained popularity as a modelling and simulation tool over the years (and especially since the introduction of powerful computers) in solving a gamut of complex engineering problems. Ansys CAE software is popular with both academia and industry because of its multi-physics capabilities, thorough documentation and availability of training institutes that provide online and in-person Ansys courses. Since the ability to use Ansys software is a plus point, students too prefer getting certified in Ansys training.

The mainstay of Ansys is the Ansys Workbench. The Ansys Workbench environment is the glue that binds the simulation process.  It tracks dependencies among the various types of data in the project. If something changes in an upstream cell, the project schematic shows that downstream cells need to be updated to reflect these changes.

Introduction to FEA
Before discussing Ansys software further, let us understand very briefly what FEA is and why it has gained prominence in recent times.

There are three broad methods to solve complex engineering problems: analytical methods, experimental methods and numerical methods. While analytical methods provide accurate solutions, they are limited to minimal geometries. Experimental methods can give accurate results, but they are costly, and in most cases not feasible financially. Finite element analysis (FEA), a numerical method to solve engineering problems, is a very versatile and comprehensive numerical technique that provides reliable engineering solutions. The most salient feature of FEA is the discretization of a given domain into a set of simple sub-domains called finite elements. The more the number of these finite elements, the more accurate the modelling and the subsequent analysis. The finite element method is a mathematical procedure based on solving differential equations as best as possible. A differential equation is any equation which contains derivatives, either ordinary or partial. They can be ordinary, partial or linear. From an engineering perspective, differential equations are important because they represent the language in which physical laws are expressed. The aim of FEA is to transform the differential equations of a system into a set of linear equations, which can then be solved by computer software.

Ansys Software
Treatment of engineering problems basically contains three main parts: create a model, solve the problem and analyze the results. Ansys, like many other FEA programs, is also divided into three main parts namely the processors which are called pre-processor, solution processor and  post-processor.

The Ansys pre-processor allows users to build geometry, define materials and generate element mesh. The Ansys processor allows users to solve problems by applying loads and obtaining solutions. The Ansys post-processor allows visualization and listing of results in a tabular form or as printouts.

Ansys offers a comprehensive software suite that spans the entire range of physics, providing access to virtually any field of engineering simulation that a design process requires. Organizations around the world trust Ansys to deliver the best value for their engineering simulation software investment.

3D Design
Rapidly explore ideas, iterate and innovate with Ansys Discovery 3D design software. With the easy-to-use tools, you can build and optimize lighter and smarter products.

Electronics
Ansys software can uniquely simulate electromagnetic performance across component, circuit and system design, and can evaluate temperature, vibration and other critical mechanical effects.

Embedded Software
Ansys provides a model-based embedded software development and simulation environment with a built-in automatic code generator to accelerate embedded software development projects.

Fluids
Ansys CFD goes beyond qualitative results to deliver accurate quantitative predictions of fluid interactions and trade-offs.

Materials
Ansys software ensures accurate, consistent, traceable materials information every time and provides the tools you need to support design, research and teaching.

Optical
Ansys optical simulation software uniquely simulates a system’s optical performance and evaluates the final illumination effect.

Platform
The Ansys simulation platform delivers the broadest suite of best-in-class simulation technology and unifies it with your custom applications, CAD software and enterprise business process tools such as PLM.

Semiconductors
Ansys empowers customers with multi-physics simulations to simultaneously solve power, thermal, variability, timing, electromagnetics and reliability challenges across the spectrum of chip, package and system to promote first-time silicon and system success.

Structures
With the finite element analysis (FEA) solvers available in the suite, you can customize and automate solutions for your structural mechanics problems and parameterize them to analyze multiple design scenarios.

Systems
As product complexity grows, so does the challenge of integrating individual components within a system to ensure they work together as expected.

Ansys is used wherever FEA is used, and use cases include structural analysis, industrial applications, tooling and automobile and aerospace engineering. Since it is a tool that focuses on FEA applications and has been doing so for the past many years, it is a very powerful tool with huge functionality. It is not an easy task to learn it on your own. There are a few credible Ansys training institutes in India; DesignTech CAD Academy is one of them.