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The challenges facing automotive engineers today include improving fuel economy, reducing emissions, managing electronics and software complexity, devel- oping autonomous vehicles and maintaining high product safety, quality and reliability. "New thinking is always coming up," says Sandeep Sovani, director, global automotive industry, for Ansys ( ansys.com ), "and there is a lot of new software that needs to be developed to enable that engineering." One of those software packages is the computer-aided engineering simulation system from Ansys. The latest version, Ansys 17.0, has a plethora of new modules, features and enhancements that, according to company officials, together deliver "10X improvements to product development productivity, insight and performance." Here are some of the new items. MESHING IS EVERYTHING "Meshing is not a simple, straight-line process, admits Sovani. "It's like flying a big aircraft, going from Destination A to Destination B. Different pilots like taking different routes." Solution Adaptive Meshing (SAM), a new capability for Ansys Forté CFD, helps control mesh refinement by balancing mesh size with mesh resolution and accuracy. SAM basically allows deep mesh refine- ment only where and when needed. Those conditions are based on primitive solution variables (such as velocity, temperature, pressure and thermal kinetic energies), or based on absolute-value range, percentile CAE from Powertrain to RADAR SYSTEMS By LAWRENCE S. GOULD, Contributing Editor A major update to the flagship CAE/FEA/CFD/simulation software from Ansys responds to the variety of new engineering in automotive. range, or standard deviations. SAM yields excellent accuracy while maintaining fast simulation speed. KEEPING UP WITH NEW FLAMES Fuel is a complicated compound made up of a blend of several chemical components. These components behave differently, particularly their laminar flame speeds. The conventional approach to simulating fuels averaged all flame speeds for the individual fuel compo- nents. This approach "leads to inaccuracies and coarser solutions," says Sovani. Now Forté includes a library generator for the laminar flame speeds of more than 50 fuel components. These flame speeds are pre-calculated for the broadest possible range of engine conditions (such as varying equivalence ratio, temperature and pressure). The library automatically accounts for the interdepen- dencies between fuel components that might affect the laminar flame speed. This automation replaces the alternative: using power-law correlations that assume independent factors (namely, pressure, equivalence ratio, temperature, dilution and fuel structure). In practice, this alternative does not accurately account for the differences in flame-speed across different exhaust gas recirculation techniques. BOOSTING FUEL CELL DESIGN Modeling fuel cell technology gets particular attention in Ansys Fluent 17. A new module details the reactions 30