What Can Ennova Do

EnnovaCFD™ for OpenFOAM^® is a complete CFD solution based on the open source industry standard OpenFOAM^® and Ennova's pre- and post- processing capabilities.

The Ennova application provides a bedrock for pre- and post-processing for Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). Ennova is built on a modern client/server architecture which offers the scalability and flexibility of cloud computing. Today’s CFD solvers are very scalable and provide accurate fluid dynamic solutions to a wide variety of physical problems. However, creating a computational mesh suitable for a solver is still a major bottleneck in the CFD process. CFD solvers require valid mesh with sufficient cell density to resolve the physics of interest.

CAD data for CFD is usually generated as part of the manufacturing design process and often is not of the quality needed for CFD. Today’s geometries, used in CFD analysis, are comprised of large assemblies which may have been constructed using multiple CAD packages, and potentially corrupted by layers of translation. Assemblies may even be generated to different tolerances in different CAD packages. Merging geometry to a clean volume is one of the most difficult challenges in the CFD process.

Ennova takes a fresh perspective to this problem. Dirty geometry is often very difficult to fix and to make it watertight often means a lot of remodeling or manual surface editing. Ennova does not translate the model, it leaves geometry in its native format with native readers (maybe complete model is from multiple CAD sources). Ennova forms a database of the geometry model to which the mesher can pass queries. No geometry is changed or fitted and multiple CAD formats can be handled this way without translation.

Ennova creates an intermediate layer between the mesh and the original CAD data. This layer can be envisioned as a shrink-wrap or referred to as the topology of the model. This topology is initially created from the CAD geometry and assumed not watertight. Automatic rules are then applied to make the topology water-tight which is usually successful without further effort. However, should the topology need further control (either from the need to be water-tight or extra resolution needed in the simulation model ) the normal manual CAD repair process can be used. Applying this methodology enables the meshed topology to be guided by the CAD model but not dependent on how the CAD model is constructed. Regardless, all cleanup is performed on the topology and the underlying geometry is left unchanged. The xyz coordinates in the original CAD data are always the same as in the mesh.

Not all the information in the CAD model is needed for meshing. The CAD repair in Ennova is intelligent in that it is controlled by the meshing algorithm in that it only cleans up what it needs to mesh. And after cleanup it checks the final geometry to make sure it is able to be cleanly meshed. This way the final clean geometry is not only geometrically clean but clean in the sense it will create a valid mesh.

Ennova is a scalable product, designed for the large, complex datasets prevalent in CFD. It is a client/server application with a distributed architecture on the server side, which can be deployed on either a public or private server. Ennova does not try to load the model onto one master node with large memory requirements, but distributes the model over many nodes with a modest memory requirement on each node. In addition, the client runs locally taking advantage of the local graphics hardware acceleration and requires modest bandwidth. Therefore, the size of the model is not limited to the amount of memory on the local machine.

Ennova is designed to streamline your CFD pipeline. The CAD repair algorithms are carefully tuned to provide the right balance between being automatic to process 99% of the model without manual input and being flexible with a suite of CAD cleanup tools which can be applied manually for specialist use.

The geometry, once repaired and cleaned, can be meshed with a variety of mesh generation schemes, or exported to your own proprietary mesher. Ennova mesh schemes include, topology-based meshing , Octree, Tetra, Cut-mesh, and Shrink-wrap for use depending on solver and model requirements. The topology-based mesher extracts the topology from the CAD model automatically and generates a body-fitted hybrid mesh by merging structured and unstructured mesh regions. Boundary layer grids can be generated automatically as needed.

The Aero-Dynamic Tool or ADT is a customized solution that allows anyone with a passing familiarity with CFD to conduct a sophisticated analysis of a automobile in a wind tunnel. The user simply enters the vehicle speed, identifies the wheels, radiator, fan, condenser and other key components, and the ADT will set up rotating frames for reference and heat transfer and porous media and other arcane CFD functionality for and OpenFOAM^® run.

This tool allows almost anyone to simulate the impact of environment pollution, given the building geometry and the pollution sources.