Wilsonville, OR. Mentor Graphics has announced its newest release of the FloMASTER 1D thermo-fluid system modeling product with advanced features for superior accuracy. The new FloMASTER product release is an advancement from previous versions, resulting from over 42 years of research and development, providing customers with superior accuracy based on more than 13 million unit test runs. New technologies in this release include model-based design (MBD), simulation-based characterization (SBC) for component modeling, an organic Rankine cycle (ORC) solver for waste heat recovery (WHR) systems, and an enhanced easy-to-use interface.
The new FloMASTER product offers advancement in system simulation. The new model-based design and simulation-based characterization features enable designers to accurately model components for which data is either difficult to obtain or non-existent. SBC allows designers to initiate a unique virtual test bench in the Mentor Graphics FloEFD tool to enhance the FloMASTER component catalog via 3D/1D computational fluid dynamics (CFD), which is available in a single license package.
To complement this work-flow and extend its utility, Mentor Graphics has developed a unique technology that enables the creation of thermo-fluid components with up to 60 arms in FloMASTER. Users can also follow a more traditional MBD path and define their own scripts to describe the desired thermodynamic model. This approach would also enable components of up to 60 arms to be simulated.
With the automation launcher feature, system models can be driven from an automatically generated Excel spreadsheet to allow any user (particularly non-experts of FloMASTER) to harness the power of system simulation in a controlled, easy-to-use environment. Reducing the manual effort to generate such a macro-enabled spreadsheet allows users to increase the value of their FloMASTER inventory by making the solver available to non-expert users.
The ORC solver is a new feature, providing the simulation of ORC-based waste heat recovery systems. This technology was developed in conjunction with Brunel University in London, where a dedicated testing rig was deployed for performance evaluation. From these tests, the ORC solver in the FloMASTER product demonstrated superior accuracy for the virtual prototyping of ORC systems.
The new FloMASTER user interface (UI) is enhanced for ease of use to reduce any barriers of adoption regardless of the user’s product experience. The importance of this is underlined by the Embry-Riddle EcoCAR 3 Team: “Our team will utilize FloMASTER to analyze a full simulation on our hardware in the loop (HIL). This innovative tool will also be used for our vehicle’s complex thermal management system to optimize our vehicle’s efficiency. The use of this tool and its convenience will allow our team to spend less time on these tasks and more time on other complex facets of our vehicle.”
Mentor Graphics conducted product user experience surveys (2014), and over 80% of respondents found the FloMASTER UI to be very user-friendly. The easy-to-use UI and the automation launcher feature now allows any non-expert to use the FloMASTER product with confidence, productivity and accuracy.
“This new release of FloMASTER provides even greater power and SBC performance with respect to 3D CFD, yet it’s easy to use with an enhanced user experience so that any organization can take advantage of the advanced capabilities to deliver superior products with faster time-to-market results,” stated Roland Feldhinkel, general manager of Mentor Graphics Mechanical Analysis Division. “Our FloMASTER technology spans over 30 years of history serving a broad range of industries and our latest release now extends to new thermo-dynamic markets such as ORC.”
The new FloMASTER product will be available in December 2016.
