Two engineering schools in Minnesota have revolutionized undergraduate instruction through the use of ANSYS Academic software in the classroom. Seven years ago, Dr. Ephraim Sparrow and I developed a course at the University of Minnesota called "Case Studies in the Thermal Sciences". This senior-level course utilized ANSYS academic software to solve industry-related problems in the thermal and fluid sciences. The course was immediately recognized by students and the class enrollment swelled to approximately 60 students per year.
Originally, ANSYS FLOTRAN was used to perform CFD solutions. Recently however, ANSYS CFX was adopted along with the ANSYS Workbench environment to greatly expand the scope of the problems which are addressed during the semester. Since then, I began teaching at the University of St. Thomas, located in St. Paul Minnesota. I have integrated a similar course into the St. Thomas curriculum which is consistently filled to capacity. In the meantime, Dr. Sparrow and graduate students Sandra Sparr and Jimmy Tong have continued to develop the course which is now taken by more than 150 students each year.
While CFD is typically studied as a graduate-level course, the ease of use and broad capability of ANSYS CFX have enabled it to be brought into the undergraduate classroom. Both Dr. Sparrow and I believe in two prime benefits of exposing undergraduates to CFD. First, the experience with ANSYS CFX deepens the students’ understanding of fluid flow phenomena. In particular, the visualization capability greatly enhances students’ intuition of flow behavior. Second, ANSYS CFX opens a door to a new class of problems which can be solved by undergraduates who are no longer limited by the narrow range of classical flow solutions.
Using ANSYS CFX academic software
allows students to solve a wide range of CFD problems.
In the graphic, streamlines represent air flow patterns through an array of heated tube banks.
The results indicate regions of separated flow (eddies) on the trailing edges of the tubes.
The streamline colors, linked to the temperature scale at the bottom of the figure,
quantify the heating of the air as it passes through the array.
Both schools are now teaching ANSYS CFX and the ANSYS Workbench Simulation environment as part of a one-semester, 15-week course which combines a theoretical basis with the computational exercises. The courses are built around “case studies”. These case studies, which are rooted in industry, expose students to increasingly complex flow situations as the semester progresses. The incredible popularity of the course has alleviated concerns about the difficulty of introducing advanced CFD simulations at the undergraduate level.
The success of ANSYS CFX at the undergraduate level has not gone unnoticed. The Supercomputing Institute for Digital Simulation & Advanced Computation at the University of Minnesota has recently acquired ANSYS CFX and a number of graduate students are currently using the software for their doctoral research.