Abaqus Multiphysics

The different physical disciplines such as structural mechanics, fluid dynamics, thermodynamics and electromagnetics are in reality tightly connected, because the interaction between multiple physical phenomena and the conversion of energy from one form to another is crucial to most industrial applications.

For example, in order to design efficient and reliable lithium ion batteries, engineers must account not just for the electrochemical behavior, but also thermal runaway, as well as fluid dynamics of the electrolyte and structural bending and swelling. Even during manufacturing, multiphysical effects need to be controlled, whether that is the flow of plastic in injection molding, or moisture build-up during electronic assembly.

The Abaqus Unified FEA product suite has significant capabilities that are used to solve multiphysics problems. These capabilities, developed over many years and fully integrated as core Abaqus functionality, have been used extensively for many engineering applications on products and engineering projects in use today.

Multiphysics technology has been a part of Abaqus from the beginning.Starting with Abaqus V2 (in 1979), Abaqus/Aqua simulates hydrodynamic wave loading on flexible structures for offshore pipelines. Through the years additional multiphysics capabilities have been added, such as fluid, thermal, electrical couplings, and many others listed below.

Creating a Multiphysics Simulation Flow in Abaqus

To address these challenging applications, Abaqus offers a range of multiphysics simulation capabilities including sequential results mapping, fully-coupled solution procedures, and co-simulation:

• Sequential results mapping - The external field capability in Abaqus provides a general framework for mapping results from an upstream simulation onto an Abaqus simulation. Examples include mapping temperature from an upstream heat transfer simulation and mapping pressure from an upstream fluid dynamics simulation.
• Fully-coupled simulation - When one-way coupling is not sufficient then Abaqus offers fully coupled solution procedures including thermal-stress, thermal-electrochemical-structural, acoustic-structural, and fluid flow through porous media.
• Co-simulation - An open co-simulation framework provides the ability to connect Abaqus with external solvers.

The advantage of Abaqus Multiphysics is the ease with which Multiphysics problems can be solved by the Abaqus structural FEA user. From the same model, same element library, same material data, and same load history, an Abaqus structural FEA model can easily be extended to include additional physics interaction.