ANSYS Workbench System Coupling: a state-of-the-art computational framework for analyzing multiphysics problems

Due to the interactions between more than one physics, multiphysics problems such as those encountered in aerospace, biomedical, civil, and nuclear engineering domains tend to be extremely challenging to simulate. This paper discusses a novel and versatile computational framework called System Coupling being developed at ANSYS Inc. that can simulate complex multiphysics coupled problems and also presents comprehensive verification and validation studies. System Coupling is a generic computational infrastructure that allows individual physics solvers running as different processes either within the same physical machine or on different machines in the network to communicate with one another using an in-house socket-based remote procedure call library. The infrastructure is capable of handling a variety of multiphysics coupled analyses such as those related to fluid-structure-thermal interactions. Thus far, ANSYS Mechanical/APDL, ANSYS FLUENT, and ANSYS CFX which are ANSYS' major computational structural and fluid dynamics solvers were instrumented to work with the System Coupling infrastructure. Verification and validation studies involving different fluid-structure interaction scenarios drawn from a variety of applications in various engineering domains are presented in the paper.