Computational Fluid Dynamics
STAR-CCM+
Overview
STAR-CCM+ is CD-adapco´s newest CFD software product. It uses the well established CFD solver technologies available in STAR-CD, and it employs a new client-server architecture and object oriented user interface to provide a highly integrated and powerful CFD analysis environment to users. This environment includes advanced pre and post-processing tools, including CAD import geometry surface analysis, automated surface repair, tools for identification and hand repair of small numbers of surface defects, tunable surface wrapping to retain the amount of surface detail required for CFD analysis, advanced automated meshing that yields polyhedral, hexahedral, or tetrahedral volume meshes, pre-simulation post processing visualization setup that can be used to monitor the progress of a simulation during solution, and a variety of other tools to ease the work of CFD analysts, such as the ability to copy and paste model components between models.With its new graphical user interface including many automated tools for meshing, solution monitoring, and post processing visualization, and plotting of primary variables and derived quantities, STAR-CCM+ is one of the easiest full featured CFD software packages to learn.
The STAR-CCM+ license allows an unlimited number of concurrent jobs, and they can use all of the available processors and cores.
Current TRACC Applications
TRACC, Turner-Fairbank Highway Research Center (TFHRC), and researchers at the University of Nebraska and Northern Illinois University are collaborating on the study of CFD-based simulation techniques. Researchers are taking reduced-scale experiments from the TFHRC hydraulics laboratory, providing the data for CFD model development, and producing a validated CFD-based advanced simulation methodology for open-channel flow, with an emphasis on riverbed scouring under bridges and the evaluation of lift and drag forces on bridge structures during floods.The applicability of commercial CFD codes such as STAR-CD for prediction of these phenomena is being investigated, and the agreement between the code predictions and experimental data will be determined for various modeling options. The scalability of these simulations to large numbers of processors, particularly for the simulation of full-scale bridge deck interactions, is being evaluated and guidelines will be developed for the decomposition of problems of this type. Cross-code comparisons of the calculated results to evaluate computational efficiency and accuracy are also under investigation.
Using STAR-CCM+@TRACC
Detailed instructions for using STAR-CCM+ on the TRACC cluster can be found on the TRACC Wiki here: STAR-CCM+. Because geometry manipulation and meshing are done in the preprocessor and these can be computationally intensive tasks, it is best to perform these tasks on a compute node. Instructions for reserving, logging into, and using a compute node with graphical user interfaces are also found on the TRACC Wiki: Accessing a compute node. STAR-CCM+ preprocessing, including meshing, currently runs in serial mode only, and therefore mesh size is limited by the memory available on a node. Normal login and compute nodes have 4 GB of memory. STAR-CCM+ can mesh about 4 million cells/GB memory for hexahedral trimmed meshes and tetrahedral meshes and about 1 million cells/GB memory for polyhedral meshes. For the generation of larger meshes, two nodes are available with 8 GB of memory and two are available with 32 GB of memory. Instructions for submitting jobs to these nodes are found on the TRACC Wiki under Large memory jobs.STAR-CCM+@TRACC Training and Reference Materials
- Training for STAR-Design is provided as part of STAR-CCM+ training offered in the spring and fall. An overview of the training course can be found HERE.
- Instructions for accessing STAR-CCM+ documentation, including tutorials are in the TRACC Wiki at: Documentation.