ANSYS Fluent on ARCHIE-WeSt
This article provides a summary of work carried out as part of the EPSRC funded “SME Engagement Springboard for Archie-West (EP/L019574/1)“. The aim of this project was to lower the barriers to the adoption of High Performance Computing in Industry, with a particular focus on the use of Ansys by SME’s. The full manual, containing instructions on how to work through the examples below, along with input files, is available here. A zip file containing input data and job-scripts is available here.
Performance
To demonstrate the improvements granted by using ARCHIE-WeSt, four different cases were prepared and then simulated using a journal file on 1 core of a Dual Intel® Xeon® E5-2620 processor on a local desktop machine and then on 4, 8 and 12 cores of a Dual Intel® Xeon® X5650 Processor node on ARCHIE-WeSt. The improvement in time taken to complete the simulation was represented as the speed of the simulation relative to the single core simulation, which was calculated as the time taken for the single core simulation divided by the time taken for the multi-core simulation. The level of improvement varies from case to case but overall the speed of the simulation scales up well with the number of cores used.
Example Cases
Example 1: Full Shell and Tube Heat Exchanger
This example illustrates the simulation of the flow-field of a water-water shell and tube heat exchanger where the shell-side fluid passes through the shell once moving around 13 baffles and the tube-side fluid passes once across the shell through 22 tubes. The exchanger operates in counter-flow and both the shell-side and tube-side fluids enter the heat exchanger at 0.1 m/s.
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The movie shows the time evolution of the velocity vector field. The movie is best viewed full-screen and at full HD (click on the settings ‘cog-wheel’ icon to access HD options).
Example 2: Partial Shell and Tube Heat Exchanger

The movie shows the time evolution of the thermal contour map. The movie is best viewed full-screen and at full HD (click on the settings ‘cog-wheel’ icon to access HD options).
Example 3: Air-Water Mixing Tank
For this example, water enters a mixing vessel with a head space full of air at 0.4 m/s. The water is then agitated by a simple rushton turbine moving at 100 rpm before leaving the vessel. This is simulated over a period of time to analyse the flow of the air and the water in the vessel.
Example 4: Biodiesel CSTR