Abaqus Multiphysics

The different physical disciplines such as structural mechanics, fluid dynamics, thermodynamics and electromagnetics are 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, to design efficient and reliable lithium-ion batteries, engineers must account not just for the electrochemical behavior but also for thermal runaway and fluid dynamics of the electrolyte and structural bending and swelling. Even during manufacturing, multiphysical effects must be controlled, whether the plastic flow in injection molding or moisture build-up during electronic assembly.

The Abaqus Unified FEA product suite has significant capabilities for solving 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 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 the one-way coupling is insufficient, 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 the Abaqus structural FEA user can solve Multiphysics problems. 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.