Dear SimScalers,
with the last releases in February and today’s update (9th of March) we will add some new features and improvements on SimScale. Feel free to put your feedback in the comments section below and add suggestions for new features in our Vote for features! section.
Volume heat sources
In thermal flow applications namely buoyant and conjugate heat transfer simulations you can now add a volume heat source based on a fluid or solid region of the domain or a geometry primitive like a cylinder or sphere. Thus, the actual heat flux profile over the bounding faces and the temperature distribution within the region will be taken into account in contrast to heat flux or temperature boundary conditions. The heat source magnitude can be defined as a total value in Watt [W] or relative to the region volume [W/m³]. See this short introduction video for more information:
Real Pressure in incompressible flow simulations
Pressure values in incompressible flow simulation setups and results are now displayed as real pressure values (in Pascals) instead of the former density-normalized pressure values (in m²/s²). This highly requested improvement will make the setup and interpretation of incompressible flow simulations more intuitive as the density-normalized pressure values were rather an artifact of the numerical method instead of having the engineering challenge of the user in mind. Learn more about this change in the separate forum post over here: Pressure Units change to Pa in incompressible flow simulations
Subdomain-based pressure initialization
The initial pressure field can be defined on separate subdomains to speed up convergence and increase robustness for applications like valve opening studies with big initial pressure differences.
Pressure field of a Pressue relief valve shortly after being opened
Project access improvements
Direct link to original project
When browsing through the newest public project you can now directly access the original project from the overview page of a copied project.
Open in new tab access in Dashboard
If you are usually working on multiple projects at once in different tabs you can now open your projects in the workbench in a new tab from the Dashboard overview.
Mesh operation tool-tips
In order to make the mesh operation choice easier for new users in particular, we added tool-tips that give an immediate visual feedback about the expected result and provide a crisp explanation as well.
Changes to the workbench
Steady-state simulations as default analysis in CFD
For all CFD analysis types except multiphase the default behavior has been changed to steady-state as, additional to the stability and ease of use advantages, steady-state simulations serve as a first validation for transient applications in many cases.
Phase-out of rarely used features
We will disable the creation of new content for some analysis types and the report generator. Those features are rarely used and do not meet the quality standard that we want to provide across the platform. You can still access old runs and download the data of course. The discontinued features are:
- Report generation
- OpenFOAM case upload
- Acoustic frequency analysis
- Discrete phase model
- Potential flow
- SU2 compressible
Please add feature requests in the Vote for features! section if you want to see one of those features enabled with an improved UX and functionality in the future.
Best regards and happy simulating,
Alexander
