Ansys Fluent is your partner in tackling the most challenging fluid dynamics simulations, backed by unparalleled accuracy, speed and versatility across industries.
Built for Every CFD Professional
Ansys Fluent is designed by CFD experts to bring you the most cutting-edge best solutions and capabilities to meet your fluid dynamics simulation needs. The following is a list of Fluent’s key capabilitites.
Where Physics, Performance, and Precision Converge
Explore a comprehensive suite of Fluent capabilities from pre-processing to solving to post-processing.
Pre-Processing
Advanced Meshing Technologies
Fluent’s meshing solutions streamline workflow and enhance accuracy with:
Task-Based, Automated Meshing
Automate the meshing process with task-based workflows that optimize mesh quality and reduce manual setup.
Mosaic Meshing
This patented technology connects polyhedral prism boundary elements to elements to either polyhedral or hexahedral elements in bulk regions, delivering highly accurate flow resolutions without excessive mesh density and avoiding tetrahedral transition elements.
Rapid Octree Meshing
Ideal for large, complex geometries, this top-down approach rapidly generates high-quality meshes from initial CAD, making it indispensable for high-resolution and multi-scale simulations.
Wrap Meshing
Efficiently handles surface geometry in complex CAD models, speeding up setup time for fluid simulations.
Pre-Processing
Customizable Materials Database
Access a vast, customizable materials database to quickly select properties suited for your application, including real fluids (steam, refrigerants, and cryogenics) and support for custom material definitions. Fluent’s materials library ensures accuracy from the start, especially in multiphase, chemical, and thermal simulations.
Solving
Density-Based and Pressure-Based Solvers
Ansys Fluent offers specialized solvers to tackle a wide range of flow conditions. Whether modeling high-speed compressible flows or low-speed fluid dynamics, Fluent ensures accurate and efficient simulations for any application.
Density-Based Solver
Suitable for high-speed and highly compressible flows, including supersonic and hypersonic regimes. Common applications:Aerospace: Hypersonic vehicles, supersonic jets, rocket nozzles.; Combustion: Detonations, high-speed reactive flows.
Pressure-Based Solver
Efficiently handles low-speed compressible and incompressible flows, from subsonic to low supersonic regimes. Common applications — HVAC and Building Systems: Airflow in ventilation and cooling systems; Automotive and Industrial Equipment: External aerodynamics, pumps, fans, and heat exchangers.
Solving
Turbulence Models
Fluent delivers cutting-edge turbulence modeling capabilities, including Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) models, such as k-epsilon and k-omega models, as well as the Reynolds stress model for highly anisotropic flows. Advanced scale-resolving turbulence models are also available: large eddy simulation (LES), detached eddy simulation (DES) and scale-adaptive simulation (SAS). Fluent also offers hybrid approaches, with various flavors of hybrid RANS-LES modeling. In addition, innovative transition models accurately predict the flow in which the boundary layer transitions from laminar to turbulent regime.
Post-Processing
High-Fidelity Ray Tracing for Enhanced Visualization
Use ray tracing to generate high-resolution, photorealistic visualizations of simulation results. Ray tracing enhances presentations, enabling stakeholders to visualize complex flow patterns, thermal gradients, and material properties clearly.
Web-Based UI for Remote Access
The Fluent web interface allows you to access Fluent on the web and view your simulation results in real time as calculations are running. Perform pre-processing to solving to post processing within a single, modernized user interface.
From battery cooling to hypersonic flight, Ansys Fluent empowers engineers to tackle industry-specific challenges with confidence—combining advanced physics, proven accuracy, and scalable performance to solve what matters most.
Master Ansys Fluent with a curated collection of resources designed to boost your CFD expertise. From in-depth tutorials and whitepapers to hands-on training modules and real-world case studies, our resource center has everything you need to unlock Fluent’s full potential and elevate your simulation skills.
Ansys Fluent has two software releases each year. Discover new features, including pre-processing, solving and post-processing enhancements, designed to transform your simulation speed, accuracy and usability.
Test the capabilities of Ansys Fluent with 30-day access to a Fluent CFD Enterprise license for free. The CFD Enterprise license includes access to the Fluent GPU Solver, all advanced physics models, and the Fluent Web Interface.
As products grow more sophisticated, so do the fluid dynamics challenges behind them. Simulating moving components like pistons and valves demands robust transient analysis. Thermal systems such as heat exchangers require precise multiphase modeling to capture phase changes. And when complex multiphysics effects like fluid–structure interaction come into play, you need advanced capabilities that deliver both accuracy and ease of use.
Multi-Phase and Single-Phase Flow Models
Accurately capturing fluid behavior is crucial for realistic simulations. Ansys Fluent provides robust models for both single-phase and multi-phase flows, enabling precise analysis of diverse fluid interactions, from simple airflows to complex phase transitions.
Multi-Phase Flow
Model gas-liquid and solid-liquid interactions, particle-laden flows, phase changes, and complex regime transitions.
Single-Phase Flow
Handle compressible and incompressible flows efficiently across various industries, from external aerodynamics to HVAC systems.
Combustion and Reaction Flow Modeling
Fluent’s combustion models accurately simulate chemical reactions, supporting all major fuel types and enabling precise emission predictions and combustion efficiency calculations—ideal for automotive, power generation, aerospace propulsion and chemical industries.
Conjugate Heat Transfer
Solve for both solid and fluid temperatures in a single environment, accurately simulating complex cooling flows and providing critical insights into thermal management for electronics, batteries, and turbomachinery.
Shape Optimization
Optimize designs with Fluent’s adjoint solver, allowing you to automatically morph your geometry to meet multiple design objectives, such as minimizing drag or increasing thermal efficiency, based on real-time feedback from simulation results.
Validate Your Physics with Confidence
Explore Ansys’ rigorous validation program to see how advanced models are benchmarked against real-world data.
Modern engineering challenges rarely involve a single type of physics. Whether you’re simulating fluid flow, thermal stresses, electromagnetic effects—or all three at once—Ansys Multiphysics combines solvers in a single workflow to reflect how products perform in the real world. It’s how engineers innovate with confidence, across industries.
Exploring the World of Multiphysics
When more than one physic is interacting (such as fluids and structures, or structures and electromagnetics), they are said to be “coupled.” These interactions happen all around us all the time, from tapping the screens on our phones to driving our cars over bumpy roads. Common examples of multiphysics couplings include:
Fluid-structure Interaction (FSI)
Airplane safety: Modeling how airflow (fluid dynamics) affects the deformation and shock absorption (structural mechanics) of landing gear.
Thermal-optics Coupling
Heads-up displays (HUDs): Modeling how outdoor temperatures (thermal effects) affect the clarity of projected images in vehicles (optics).
Structural-acoustic Coupling
Road noise: Modeling how aural feedback (acoustics) in vehicles is caused by tire-to-surface friction (structural mechanics).
Electromagnetic-thermal Coupling
Power generation: Modeling how a motor’s energy fields (electromagnetics) produce heat (thermal dynamics) to optimize heat exchangers and fans.
Watch and Learn
Explore Multiphysics in Action
Watch our on-demand webinar series to see how engineers across industries are using Ansys multiphysics to solve real-world problems with real-time accuracy.
Run Your CFD Simulations Faster with the Ansys Fluent GPU Solver
Why Use the Ansys Fluent GPU Solver?
GPUs offer the promise of significant increases in throughput for CFD simulations, and Ansys is at the forefront of this revolution with its native GPU implementation of the Ansys Fluent solver. You can expect substantial performance and speed-up improvements of your CFD simulations when compared against traditional CPU hardware, with a single GPU being equivalent to ~400 CPU cores—all while maintaining lower power consumption and energy costs.
Leverage the parallel processing of GPU hardware and experience exponential solve time reductions. You no longer have to wait weeks or months for your simulations to solve—with the Ansys Fluent GPU Solver you can solve most of your CFD studies within a single working day.
Scalability
Whether you are running a small model in the thousand to millions of mesh cells range or running extremely complex models in the billions of mesh cells range, the Fluent GPU Solver can accommodate the most complex CFD models around—enabling a step-change in what was previously thought possible in CFD.
Greater Accuracy
The launch of the Fluent GPU Solver has been accompanied by a major testing and validation program to ensure that the GPU solution is comparable to experiment and physical test. Trust in a solution that is backed by extensive accuracy validation benchmarks.
Energy and Cost Savings
By dramatically reducing simulation runtimes and compute resource requirements, the Fluent GPU Solver lowers energy consumption and operating costs—enabling faster design cycles with a lighter environmental and financial footprint.
Automation, Optimization, and Customization with Ansys Fluent
Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) experts are well versed in fluid mechanics, numerical analyses, and data structures. However, while CFD experts are masters of fluids, they’re not always optimization, automation, or customization specialists. This is why we provide tailored solutions that CFD engineers can explore for more efficient workflows.
One-click Optimizer
With the one-click optimizer (OCO), available in Fluent, based on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) algorithms, CFD experts can try their hands at optimization without in-depth optimization expertise and without leaving the Fluent platform. This solution provides built-in features from Ansys optiSLang, our process integration and design optimization software, and enables automatic design optimization in just one click.
PyFluent is a python library that allows you to interact with Ansys Fluent programmatically, enabling automated, customized and streamlined CFD workflows through the power of Python.
Automation
Automate repetitive tasks and complex workflows.
Customization
Tailor Fluent operations to specific needs with Python scripts.
Efficiency
Improve productivity by reducing manual intervention.
Flexibility
Seamlessly integrate with other Python libraries and tools.
Whether you are a developer with an idea that could disrupt the market or an established company looking to customize and automate your simulation workflows to reduce time to market, PyFluent is for you.
Meshing is a critical part of CFD analysis and affects solver robustness, accuracy and computational requirements. CFD users want ease of use, efficient workflows, and fast mesh generation. Ansys Fluent offers automated meshing solutions that provide task-based workflows and behind-the-scenes automations for limited user intervention.
Water-tight Meshing
For watertight or ‘clean’ geometries, follow a simple, step-by-step workflow that allows you to complete all stages of a CFD simulation, from meshing to solving to post-processing entirely within the same software session and in the same single-window user environment.
Mosaic Meshing
Transitioning between varying types of mesh elements in complex geometries and flow regimes has long been a major simulation challenge. Ansys Mosaic technology provides solutions by automatically connecting different types of meshes with general polyhedral elements for high-fidelity results.
Polyhedral Unstructured Mesh Adaption (PUMA)
This patented technology automatically and dynamically refines the mesh to track fine details in the flow. As a result, you can get the accuracy you need, when you need it, to capture simulation details while leaving Coarser mesh elsewhere for faster solve times.
Rapid Octree Meshing
This advanced meshing approach quickly generates high-quality meshes, particularly for complex geometries. It uses an octree-based algorithm, which systematically subdivides a computational domain into smaller cells, refining areas of interest while maintaining efficiency in less critical regions. This method is well-suited for handling intricate shapes and large-scale models.
Using the Adjoint Solver, a free add-on available within Ansys Fluent, you can automatically optimize the shape of your design with minimal turn-around time using sensitivity-based algorithms.
Ansys Fluent's parametric workflows streamline design exploration by automating geometry variations, meshing, solving, and post-processing within a single setup. Engineers can define key parameters—such as inlet velocity, shape modifications, or boundary conditions—and systematically evaluate multiple design scenarios.
Immersive User Experience with the Fluent Web Interface
Fluent Web Interface Transforms Remote Simulation Workflows
With the Fluent web interface, engineers no longer have to wait until the end of a simulation to see what’s happening. This powerful browser-based interface brings live, interactive graphics to traditionally non-graphical, remote, or cluster-based simulations, allowing users to visualize results in real-time as they compute. Engineers can identify issues early, adjust settings on the fly, and avoid wasted compute time. Additionally, the ability to securely share simulation sessions via URL facilitates seamless collaboration across teams and stakeholders, thereby accelerating design decisions and reducing costly rework.
Accessible on the web
Sick of having to download your CFD software? With the Fluent Web Interface, you can now open Fluent directly on a web browser on any device, including a laptop, tablet or smartphone with no software installation necessary.
Monitor Results in Real-Time
The Fluent Web Interface provides a way to convert non-graphical simulations on cloud to a web-based session with interactive graphics, enabling engineers to monitor their simulation results and make changes in real-time, all before the problem has been solved.
Modernized, Single Platform Experience
With the Fluent Web Interface, you can perform your pre-processing, solving and post-processing all within a modernized, single window workflow.
Build for Collaboration
Share your unique Fluent web interface URL with colleagues and power increased communication and collaboration between engineers and stakeholders. Multiple individuals can work together and access the same simulation(s) live, from anywhere in the world, and work simultaneously on the same project.
Want to Learn More?
The Fluent web interface is currently available to all Fluent customers on any license type.
In the race for cleaner, more efficient gas turbines, engineers face increasing demands for higher efficiency, lower emissions, and enhanced durability. Whether for power generation, aviation, or industrial applications, the need to optimize gas turbine design has never been greater.
Powering the Future
Aerodynamics Excellence in Gas Turbine Design
Blade aerodynamics
Carry detailed aerothermal analysis of turbine and compressor blades, including shock waves, separation, and secondary flows to refine blade shapes and manage blade cooling for maximum efficiency and reduced losses.
Accurate and fast performance prediction
Run stage or multistage CFD analysis on the whole operating range of the machine to accurately predict performance.
Transient blade-row interactions
Capture unsteady interactions between rotating and stationary components, including wake passing, shocks, and secondary flows using validated pitch-change and harmonic analysis methods.
The Fluent Advantage
Combustion and Emissions Control
From clean energy to high-efficiency engines, Ansys Fluent is helping to revolutionize combustion and emissions control with high-fidelity CFD simulations.
Combustion modeling
Perform combustor simulations using either detailed chemistry, or Flamelet Generated Manifold (FGM) models to accurately predict aerothermal behavior, fuel-air mixing, flame structure, and detailed phenomena including ignition and blowout.
Emissions prediction
Predict pollutant formation, including NOx, SOx, CO, and soot and meet compliance standards while maintaining performance.
Hydrogen and alternative fuel combustion
Design new fuel injection systems like micromixers or capture the effect of blending low carbon fuels like hydrogen or ammonia using validated chemistry and combustion mechanisms. Accurately capture Critical to Quality (CTQs) such as flashback, flame holding, and NOx emissions.
Fluent’s High-Fidelity CHT Simulations
Design the best cooling scheme for high pressure turbine blades and combustor liner walls using the virtual-injection film cooling model and the effusion cooling model.
Multiphysics Simulations
Ansys provides comprehensive multiphysics solutions for the gas turbine industry, integrating aerodynamics, combustion, heat transfer, and structural integrity to optimize performance and reliability. The streamlined coupling of Ansys Fluent or Ansys CFX with Ansys Mechanical for fluid-structure interaction (FSI), aeromechanics, acoustics, and thermomechanical modeling enables a holistic approach to gas turbine design, reducing thermal stress, improving efficiency, and extending component life.
Powering Gas Turbine Design Innovations with GPUs and AI
With the latest breakthroughs in GPU and AI technology, gas turbine manufacturers and designers are experiencing a step-change in product design and overall time to market. Through the combination of Ansys AI tools and the Ansys Fluent GPU Solver, you can simulate gas turbines faster than ever before, while also providing input data for Ansys SimAI for fast and powerful predictions and optimized design suggestions. Leverage these tools for quicker and more efficient turbine designs.
Why Choose Fluent for Gas Turbine Simulation?
In the relentless pursuit of efficiency and innovation, gas turbine engineers turn to Ansys Fluent—the industry’s gold standard for end-to-end gas turbine simulation. From pushing aerodynamic limits to perfecting combustion efficiency and cooling strategies, Fluent delivers unmatched accuracy and speed—empowering engineers to reduce emissions, enhance durability, and maximize performance—from an R&D team that understands the gas turbines industry’s unique design challenges.
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes. Fluent/CFX supports steady-state and transient simulations, including blade passing effects, rotating stall, and transient rotor-stator interactions. In addition, Ansys CFX’s Harmonic Analysis models provide an efficient solution to analyzing blade passing interactions.
Yes, Fluent/CFX includes sliding mesh/transient rotor-stator and mixing plane models for multi-stage turbomachinery simulations, capturing flow interactions and pressure fluctuations.
Yes, Fluent/CFX can be coupled with Ansys Mechanical for fluid-structure interaction (FSI), allowing thermal stress, expansion, and fatigue analysis.
The multi-GPU solver accelerates compressible flow, reacting flow, and CHT simulations, enabling faster iterations and real-time design exploration.
Mixing is at the heart of critical processes in chemical, pharmaceutical, food, and energy industries. Ansys mixing simulations help engineers understand and optimize fluid behavior—reducing waste, shortening development cycles, and improving product quality. Simulate real-world mixing challenges with precision, from lab-scale to production-scale.
Chemical Processing
Reactor performance depends heavily on how fluids mix. Ansys CFD reveals how design changes affect mixing time, concentration, and temperature distribution—helping chemical engineers reduce batch times, boost yields, and scale up with confidence.
Energy and Battery Production
In energy applications, mixing simulations support processes like fuel blending, slurry distribution, and battery electrode production. Ansys helps engineers model multiphase flows and particle interactions critical for performance and reliability.
Ensure Consistency
Pharmaceutical Manufacturing
Pharmaceutical mixing must meet strict quality standards. Ansys simulations help model ingredient blending, heat-sensitive components, and suspension uniformity—ensuring each dose meets efficacy and safety requirements before physical trials begin.
Improve Flavor and Texture
Food and Beverage
Uniform mixing affects not just taste, but product texture and shelf life. Ansys tools simulate mixing of solids, liquids, and gases in food systems—helping producers enhance consistency while reducing processing time and energy consumption.
Design Cleaner Systems
Water and Wastewater Treatment
Efficient mixing in clarifiers and aeration tanks impacts treatment performance. Ansys enables you to simulate fluid flow, chemical reactions, and residence times—leading to better pollutant removal and energy-efficient system designs.
Learn More About Mixing Simulation
Explore how Ansys mixing simulation helps you solve real-world process challenges—ensuring efficiency, consistency, and scalability from design to production.
Designing efficient heat exchangers is critical across the energy, HVAC, automotive, and electronics industries. Ansys Fluent delivers the accuracy and speed engineers need to model complex thermal behavior, reduce over design, and meet performance targets faster. With robust conjugate heat transfer (CHT) capabilities and advanced meshing tools, you can simulate real-world heat exchanger conditions before you ever build a prototype.
Design Smarter for Renewable Energy
From steam cycle recuperators to flow batteries and feedwater heaters, Ansys Fluent helps renewable energy engineers maximize heat recovery and system efficiency. Simulate heat exchanger performance under fluctuating thermal loads with high fidelity.
Accelerate Automotive Thermal Design
Use Fluent to model charge air coolers, transmission oil coolers, and battery thermal management systems. Simulate transient thermal loads and multiphase flow to reduce underhood temperatures and improve fuel economy.
Tackle Electronics Cooling Challenges
Ensure thermal reliability of compact and high-power devices by simulating air- and liquid-cooled heat exchangers. Optimize fin geometry, flow uniformity, and coolant selection to avoid hotspots and extend device lifespan.
Simulate Conjugate Heat Transfer
Capture conduction, convection, and thermal radiation in a single, coupled simulation to model real-world temperature distributions across both solids and fluids. This allows for more accurate thermal predictions and smarter design tradeoffs early in development.
Engineer for Industrial Scale-Up
For process industries, scale lab-validated designs to commercial-sized heat exchangers with confidence. Fluent’s turbulence models and multiphase flow capabilities allow you to model fouling, phase change, and maldistribution with precision.
Learn More About Heat Exchangers and Ansys
Discover how Ansys helps you design and optimize heat exchangers across industries—improving efficiency, safety, and time to market.
Designing next-generation wind turbines requires more than mechanical intuition—it demands accurate simulation of fluid flow, turbulence, and thermal behavior under real-world conditions. Ansys Fluent empowers engineers with advanced aerodynamic, thermal, and acoustic modeling to maximize power output, reduce noise, and accelerate innovation across the entire turbine system.
Optimize Wind Blade Aerodynamics
Simulate flow behavior over rotating blades under varying wind conditions using high-fidelity turbulence models. Fluent enables engineers to reduce drag, delay stall, and improve lift for better annual energy production.
Reduce Turbine Noise Emissions
Predict and analyze aerodynamic noise caused by blade-turbulence interaction. Use Fluent’s acoustic modeling tools to comply with environmental noise regulations and enhance turbine siting and design.
Validate Performance with Digital Twins
SSE Renewables used Ansys Fluent to build high-fidelity digital twins of offshore wind assets. These twins provided predictive insights that helped optimize performance, reduce downtime, and increase energy yield—even before the turbines were built.
Improve Structural Integrity via FSI
Leverage fluid-structure interaction (FSI) to analyze how unsteady aerodynamic loads affect blade deformation and fatigue. This leads to more reliable designs that extend operational life and reduce maintenance costs.
Simulate Complex Atmospheric Conditions
Capture wind shear, turbulence, and terrain-induced flow phenomena. Fluent helps optimize turbine placement and performance prediction, especially for offshore or complex land-based installations.
Learn More About Wind Turbines and Ansys
Discover how Ansys helps you design quieter, cooler, and more efficient wind turbines—from blades to balance-of-plant systems.
As battery systems grow more powerful and compact, thermal safety and electrochemical precision are mission-critical. Ansys Fluent provides engineers with detailed, multiphysics simulation capabilities to optimize battery cell, module, and pack performance—helping reduce thermal risk, extend lifetime, and accelerate electrification across industries.
Optimize Cell Performance Through Electrochemistry
Capture complex electrochemical behavior within cells, including ion diffusion, species transport, reaction kinetics, and aging mechanism. Fluent helps engineers analyze internal losses and degradation—paving the way for longer-lasting, higher-capacity cells.
Analyze and Improve Battery Thermal Management System
Use Fluent’s battery thermal management models to analyze how heat is generated and spreads throughout battery packs. Detect hotspots. Design and optimize cooling strategies before physical testing, improving both safety and performance.
Mitigate Thermal Runaway Propagation in a Pack
High energy density cells carry the risk of thermal runaway. Propagation of thermal runaway from a single trigger cell to the entire battery pack is especially dangerous. Fluent enables engineers to evaluate various cooling and heat transfer strategies to ensure compliance with safety standards.
Optimize Liquid and Air Cooling
Evaluate the effectiveness of air- and liquid-cooled thermal management systems with full 3D airflow and heat transfer simulation. Fluent enables precise temperature control in EV packs, consumer devices, and stationary storage systems.
Integrate Battery Reduced Order Models into System Design
Convert high-fidelity Fluent battery CFD models into reduced order models (ROMs), which can then be applied in electric powertrain system simulations or serve as plant models for BMS design.
Learn More About Ansys Battery Thermal Management Solutions
Thermal management is critical to ensure battery top performance and safety. Discover Ansys solutions.