Hexagon’s Manufacturing Intelligence division has enlisted the help of Fugaku, the world’s fastest supercomputer to demonstrate the power of complex computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations in manufacturing.
The research was driven by a partnership with Fujitsu Ltd., which will allow customers to use Hexagon’s Cradle CFD software on Fujitsu’s commercially available PRIMEHPC series supercomputer that utilizes the Fugaku technology.
Through this research, the company has learned that the performance of next-generation aircraft and electric vehicles can be explored in greater detail and with many more iterations using this technique.
“Simulation holds the key to innovations in aerospace and eMobility. Advances such as the low-power Fugaku supercomputing architecture are one of the ways we can tap into these insights without costing the Earth, and I am delighted by what our Cradle CFD team and our partners have achieved,” says Roger Assaker, president of design & engineering for Hexagon’s Manufacturing Intelligence division.
The two companies discovered that these cutting-edge semiconductors help manufacturers analyse all the complexities of reality with less than half the energy use and at a fraction of the cost of traditional simulation methods.
CFD simulations require significant computational power and resource. Consequently, engineers have to spend many hours simplifying a real product design just so that it can be simulated to make sure it will perform as needed.
Hexagon’s Cradle CFD customers will have the opportunity to tap into the power of Fujitsu’s ARM-based Fugaku computer architecture to achieve complex simulations quickly and easily.
Engineers will now be able to simulate complex designs without having to simplify them, not only saving time but also giving access to significantly enhanced detail. This will enable multiple design options, using simulation more frequently to refine and test their designs and explore new concepts that cannot be explored with physical testing. Manufacturers now stand to benefit from this increased speed and detail. Their engineers could also use this type of simulation routinely in their daily work, as the Fugaku architecture uses approximately a third of the energy of the computers they use currently, reducing cost and improving environmental sustainability.
“Fujitsu was pleased to have the chance to work with Software Cradle Co., Ltd. to tune and validate the performance of the scFLOW’s solver for large models on the supercomputer Fugaku and the Fujitsu Supercomputer PRIMEHPC series, which utilizes the technology of Fugaku,” says Masahide Fujisaki, executive director of Fujitsu Ltd.
Hexagon hails this development as revolutionary for engineers in a number of sectors, including automotive, aerospace and construction, all of which need the insights provided by large scale CFD simulation.
Automotive
This is particularly valuable at a time when the automotive and aerospace industries are racing to bring new forms of mobility and electrified powertrains to market.
Hexagon experts collaborated closely with Fujitsu to tune the simulation code to run on Fugaku and complete test simulations. A typical family car was simulated in its entirety, which is only possible with enhanced computational power. This model comprised 70 million elements using 960 cores and was simulated until steady state using the RANS equation over 1000 cycles.
Aerospace
In aerospace, the impact of turbulence that forms around the wings of an aircraft is critical to its safety. Turbulence is the result of many vortices, some of which are so small that they are not feasible to simulate using current methods. Engineers can now achieve a higher resolution simulation to better understand the impact of turbulence on the structural integrity of aerospace parts.
