Airpak 2.0, the latest version of Fluent's air flow modeling software, was released to users in June. Having made its debut a year ago, Airpak has developed a reputation as an easy-to-use CFD tool that lets the user model flows with heat transfer and contaminant transport. Designed for flows in interior ventilation systems as well as external building flows, it has demonstrated to many new users that it can reduce the risk for new designs and improve the efficiency of current designs while saving time and money.

Several new features are highlighted in the latest release. To generate animations, Airpak 2.0 makes it unnecessary for users to purchase additional software. Airpak exports the animation in MPEG, AVI, animated GIF or FLI file formats. In the area of CAD import, Airpak users can already import existing CAD geometries in either IGES or DXF formats. The new version has an enhanced import capability that directly converts IGES surfaces into Airpak objects, saving the time and expense of building a computer model from scratch.

Several new boundary condition enhancements are available. New diffuser macros make it easy to quickly and accurately model air inlet diffusers with simplified boundary conditions that capture the diffuser performance. These boundary conditions are derived from the latest ASHRAE-sponsored research on diffusers. In addition, users can quickly compute solar loading boundary conditions on various Airpak objects, accounting for day, time, geographical location, and surface orientation.

Thermal comfort is one of many room air qualities that Airpak solutions can deliver.

On the solver side, Airpak 2.0 includes a new zero-equation indoor turbulence model, a simple but reliable turbulence model for room ventilation. New grid-to-grid interpolation allows users to change geometries as needed and to rapidly reuse previous solutions to examine the effects of the changes. Parallel processing on multiple-CPU machines or across networked machines, automatic report writing, and an auto-save feature are just a few of the additional enhancements designed to increase efficiency and decrease time-to-solution.

"The demand for air flow modeling to be done upfront in the design process for ventilation systems is heating up," says Airpak Product Manager Walter Schwarz, "and more and more firms are selecting Airpak as their tool of choice. The features that we've added with this new release are in response to the continuous market demands for faster model building, faster solutions, and easier ways to produce effective pictures, plots and animations from simulation results."

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