About SC/Tetra

How the Right CFD Software Will Build Your Engineers’, Bean Counters’, and Boss’ Commitment to CFD Instead of Making Enemies Out of Them

If your company is thinking about venturing into the world of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), the task of selecting the right CFD software for your needs can appear formidable. When making this decision, you try to take into consideration what others in your company want. The engineers want power, capability, functionality, flexibility, and ease of use. The accountants want the lowest price. Your boss wants results.

Your dilemma is compounded because there are a slew of CFD software products on the market, and they all look pretty much the same. In addition, if you don’t have an in-depth knowledge of CFD, you may have difficulty sifting through the sales propaganda. After all, every CFD software on the market appears to seamlessly interface to CAD, builds the CFD mesh for a flow in a pipe, produces pretty pictures, and can solve a lot more complex problems as shown in the pretty color brochures. So what’s the catch? If decisions were truly this easy, success would be just around the corner. Unfortunately, selecting the right CFD software for your needs isn’t this easy. In fact, next to making sure you have the right people with the proper skills and interest to do CFD, choosing the right CFD software package is probably your next greatest challenge.

If you’re in the market for CFD software, here are a few reasons why you may want to consider SC/Tetra CFD software.

SC/Tetra is Full Function CFD software with Features and Capabilities that Exceed Even the Most Well Recognized CFD Software on the Market

SC/Tetra is true, full function, general purpose CFD software that’s flexible enough to grow with your simulation/modeling needs. This is frequently not the case for simpler codes or specialty software which can usually only be used for certain applications. SC/Tetra can be used for an unlimited number of flow applications including compressible/incompressible, transient, reacting, mixing, rotating machinery, conjugate heat transfer (including radiation), and even free surface flows. New simulation capabilities in SC/Tetra V6 include cavitation models, porous media models with thermal conduction, and weak compressible flow modeling with LES, enabling simulation of low frequency wind aerodynamics. The latest version of SC/Tetra also contains a heat conduction panel model that enables simulation of geometries with fins, e.g. heat exchanger, with less mesh. You may think you don’t need all these capabilities, and you may not initially. But it’s nice to know they’re there if you need them (and the more CFD you do, the more opportunities you’ll find).

With these capabilities SC/Tetra is powerful enough to be the primary, general purpose CFD software used by several major corporations including:

• Toyota
• Toshiba
• Suzuki
• Kawasaki
• Sanyo
• Mitsubishi
• Mazda
• Yamaha

Yet SC/Tetra is PC based so it brings all these same capabilities to single users. No wonder SC/Tetra is the fastest growing CFD software in Asia and is now making these proven capabilities available world-wide.

Just how good is SC/Tetra? The Japanese Society of Automotive Engineers (JSAE) rated CFD software in a paper entitled “CFD Commercial Codes and Computers Comparison”
Proceedings# 20014696 (2001).

In addition, SC/Tetra was designed from its inception to be PC/Windows based. This makes it faster and more memory efficient than most of today’s so-called PC based CFD software, most of which were initially designed for UNIX platforms and later adapted to PC’s. SC/Tetra continues to advance with today’s rapidly changing computer environment. The software complies with next generation 64bit CPU and dual core CPU architectures. The 64 bit environment enables calculations for element sizes that are eight times greater than those for standard architectures. With the ability to handle even larger models, a parallel calculation system with dual core CPU can be affordably constructed to reduce the overall calculation times for large and highly complex models.

Finally an End to Modeling Nightmares

You don’t have to be the CAE business very long to know that building good models is probably the most formidable obstacle standing between you and success. Those sales demonstrations where the sales person goes from CAD geometry to volume mesh with one mouse click may work for simple geometries. But they rarely work for the more complex, real world situations. Cracks, overlapping surfaces in the volume mesh, skewed cells, or insufficient grid density, and countless other mesh related problems can keep you from getting a converged solution. Frequently it seems to take forever to find the problem areas since you may have to sift through thousands of cells. If you’re fortunate you’ll have access to specialized 3rd party software to help diagnose and repair your mesh. If you’re not so fortunate you may have to purchase this software just to finish your models. That’ll cost you more money because good 3rd party grid generation software costs about $ 10,000 per year to lease. You may wonder why CFD software (even the most popular high end product) doesn’t come with built in mesh diagnostics and mesh repair capabilities like those integrated into SC/Tetra, especially since these problems are so prevalent with CFD volume meshes. To be quite honest, we don’t know why.

Eyesight Going Bad Looking for All Those Microscopic Mesh Defects?

The SC/Tetra CFD software preprocessor contains built in diagnostics for identifying problematic cracks, leaks, and intersecting surfaces in the volume mesh. It also contains mesh repair functions so you can fix these problems within SC/Tetra itself. You won’t need to buy any additional software. In addition, SC/Tetra calculates mesh skewness parameters so you can continuously track the quality of your mesh. When you’re trying to adjust the grid density, say for example in regions of high gradients, some software packages require you to adjust the grid density on the surface mesh in order to change the volume mesh. This provides very little control of the volume mesh density and usually puts more cells where you don’t want them and takes them out where you want them. SC/Tetra’s Oct-tree meshing process gives you unparalleled control of the volume mesh. You can easily increase or decrease the mesh density exactly where you want to.

Full Functionality and 30 – 50% Less Expensive

In the world of CFD you’ll find the cost of a license can vary anywhere from FREE to upward of $ 25 - 30,000 per year. Freeware is usually very limited and not recommended for general purpose use. In contrast the high end software is multi-purpose software and very widely used throughout the industry. In fact, the companies developing and selling these general purpose CFD control upward of 60% of the CFD market share. If you’re a large company purchasing several software licenses, the larger CFD software companies will offer you a packaged, discounted price. However, if you only need a few licenses, you’ll probably have to pay full price for each license. In addition, if the models you’re building have a high degree of geometrical complexity, you’ll probably also need to purchase a 3rd party grid generation software package to diagnose and repair your meshes. Most likely you’ll land up using the 3rd party software to do the actual mesh generation. This will cost an additional $ 10,000/year/seat and run your total software costs into the $ 35,000 range. If you have to buy a UNIX workstation to run the software efficiently, the initial investment starts to look inhibiting.

SC/Tetra’s value proposition is much more promising. SC/Tetra is full general purpose CFD software with unparalleled preprocessing capabilities. Its capabilities rival or exceed the most popular CFD software packages on the market today. In addition, SC/Tetra contains integrated automatic mesh generation, robust solver, and post-processor so you don’t have to purchase 3rd party grid generation software no matter how complex you models are. SC/Tetra accepts standard geometry data formats so it’s compatible with most of the standard CAD software used in industry. And it’s optimized for PC’s. How much does an SC/Tetra annual license cost? Try 30-50% less than its competitors. A single seat license starts at $ 15,000 per year In today’s cost conscious business world, that should be enough to raise any bean counter’s eyebrow.

Don’t Just Take Our Word for It

SC/Tetra is the fastest growing CFD software in Japan and Asia and is now being made available in the United States through Upwind Technology, Inc. (Sterling Heights, MI). For more information about SC/Tetra go to http://www.sctetra.com or contact Upwind Technology (586) 977-6800.