A Product Model based Approach to Interactive CAE Design Optimization

We present a software prototype for fluid flow problems in civil engineering, which combines essential features of Computational Steering approaches with efficient methods for model transfer and high performance computing. The main components of the system are described: - The modeler with a focus on the data management of the product model - The pre-processing and the post-processing toolkit - The simulation kernel based on the Lattice Boltzmann method - The required hardware for real-time computin

Computational Steering in Civil Engineering

Computational Steering provides methods for the integration of modeling, simulation, visualization, data analysis and post processing. The user has full control over a running simulation and the possibility to modify objects (geometry and other properties), boundary conditions and other parameters of the system interactively. The objective of such a system is to explore the effects of changes made immediately and thus to optimize the target problem interactively. We present a computational steering based system for fluid flow problems in civil engineering. It is based on three software components as shown in figure 1. The modeler is the CAD-system AutoCAD, which offers a powerful programming interface allowing an efficient access to the geometric data. It also offers convenient manipulators for geometric objects. The simulation kernel is a Lattice-Boltzmann (LB) solver for the Navier-Stokes equations, which is especially suitable for instationary flows in complex geometries. For the visualization and postprocessing we use the software tool AVS, which provides a powerful programming interface and allows the efficient visualization of flow fields. These three components are interconnected through two communication modules and three interfaces as depicted in figure 1. Interface 1 is responsible for the transformation of the modified system for the simulation kernel, interface 2 is responsible for the proper preparation of the simulation data whereas interface 3 transforms the data from the modeler into a format suitable for the visualization system. The whole system is synchronized by the two communication modules