The transient flow solver in our surge and general flow analysis software BOSfluids was already very fast. By using some novel and state-of-the-art numerical methods it has just been made up to two orders of magnitude faster. No, that is not a typo: two orders of magnitude. The only downside is that you have no time anymore to drink your coffee at leisure.
The BOSfluids transient flow solver, like many solvers of its kind, is based on the robust and fast method of characteristics. This method, however, has one significant drawback: the ratio between the flow grid point spacing and the integration time step is determined by the wave speed of the fluid in the piping system. This means that an accurate flow grid tends to require many small time steps, resulting in long execution times for models involving long pipeline sections.
BOSfluids already applied some sophisticated methods to generate an optimal flow grid and to make use of multiple processor cores in parallel in order to reduce the execution times of transient flow analyses. This made BOSfluids one of the fastest transient pipe flow analysis that is available. In spite of this, large piping models still required a significant amount of time. As a consequence, you had to reduce the number of variations on the model to be examined, or reduce the complexity of the model.
The upcoming BOSfluids 6.1 release will reduce the transient analysis time significantly by using a novel grid coarsening method. This means that the grid point spacing and the time step size is no longer constant throughout the entire piping model; a larger grid point spacing and a larger time step size is used for long pipeline sections, while a smaller grid point spacing and time step size is used for smaller and more detailed pipeline sections. The effect of this is a dramatic decrease of the analysis time without compromising the accuracy of the results. Indeed, the analysis time for large, real-world piping models has been reduced by two orders of magnitude is some cases.
BOSfluids 6.1 is scheduled to be released in the second quarter of this year. In addition to the major performance improvements, it will bring you many new features that make BOSfluids the surge analysis of choice even more.
For more information, please contact:
Phone: +31 85 058 00 46
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