What's New in FLOW-3D HYDRO 2023R1
Shallow water turbulence models
Turbulence is a key aspect of water and environmental flow fields, especially so in regimes modeled with shallow water approximations. We enhanced our treatment of turbulence in our shallow water model to include three new turbulence models, the constant diffusivity, mixing length, and Smagorinsky models, to help reduce modeling risk and give better results.
What's New in FLOW-3D HYDRO 2022R2
With the release of FLOW-3D HYDRO 2022R2, Flow Science has unified the workstation and HPC versions of FLOW-3D HYDRO to deliver a single solver engine capable of taking advantage of any type of hardware architecture, from single node CPU configurations to multi-node parallel high performance computing executions. Additional developments include improved entrained air functionalities, as well as boundary condition definition improvements for water and environmental applications.
Unified solver
We migrated our FLOW-3D products to a single, unified solver to run seamlessly on local workstations or on high performance computing hardware environments.
Many users run their models on laptops or local workstations, but in addition run larger models on high performance computing clusters. With the 2022R2 release, the unified solver allows users to exploit the same benefits of OpenMP/MPI hybrid parallelization from HPC solutions to run on workstations and laptops.
Multi socket workstations
Multi socket workstations are now very common and capable of running large simulations. With the new unified solver, users using this type of hardware will generally see performance gains from being able to run models taking advantage of OpenMP/MPI hybrid parallelization that used to be only available on HPC cluster configurations.
Low level routines improved vectorization and memory access
Performance gains on the order of 10% to 20% have been observed for most test cases, with some cases yielding run-time benefits in excess of 20%.
Refined volumetric convective stability limit
Time step stability limit is a major driver in model runtime, with 2022R2, a new time step stability limit, 3D convective stability limit, is available in the numerics widget. For models that are running and convection limited (cx, cy, or cz limits) the new option has shown typical speed-ups on the order of 30%.
Pressure solver pre-conditioner
In some cases, for challenging flow configurations, run times can be drawn out due to excessive pressure solver iterations. For those difficult cases, with 2022R2, when a model iterates too heavily, FLOW-3D automatically activates a new pre-conditioner to help with pressure convergence. Tests have improvements in runtime anywhere from 1.9 to 335 faster!
Log conformation tensor method for visco-elastic fluids
A new solver option for visco-elastic fluids is available to our users, and is particularly effective for high Weissenberg numbers.
FLOW-3D HYDRO boundary conditions refinements
Two improvements for water application boundary conditions are available in FLOW-3D HYDRO 2022R2. Shallow water volume flow rate boundary conditions have been improved to yield more realistic, spatially-varying velocity profiles so users can reduce the domain size without losing accuracy. For natural inlet boundary conditions, the response to transient conditions can be improved with the use of the rating curve relaxation time option.
Improved entrained air functionalities
For diffusers and similar bubble flow applications, mass sources can now be used to introduce air into the water column. In addition, default values for the turbulent diffusion of entrained air and dissolved oxygen have been updated.
