Ansys Version History

[Gracia Bradshaw]

Isaved my workbench yesterday and today I reopened it. The restore workbench window popped up, so I thought something went wrong with saving, I pressed OK. However, my workbench was missing about 90% of the transformers, no connections whatsoever, only a few transformers, bookmarks and inspectors made it through. Is there any way to undo the restore? Or is there any backup location? There's weeks work in this workbench and I absolutely cannot afford to lose it.

Really sorry but I think it could bad news especially if you saved the Workspace file again (overwriting) the file. There is no backup location. Workbench creates recovery data if there is a crash of Workbench, but if you have opened and closed the Workspace file this would have been lost. There is no versioning of a Workspace once it is closed. Within a single editing session you can use the history tool to go back to an earlier state in that session but not once the file is closed.

@mark_1spatial It's the "A recovery file was found" message. The odd thing is, I wasn't able to save the workbench once I opened it through the recovery window(which I Interpreted as "this is the most recent version of the file").

@pim - that message normally indicates that Workbench closed unexpectedly and the recover file could be used - when I see this I often go and copy the Workbench file before continuing to another location else as a backup. But as mentioned they tend to get cleaned up pretty quickly when reopening.

It's less of an answer and more of a comment, but since the FMW files are essentially text files, I use version control with Git. In fact, this recently helped me on a project I was working on when I went down a very dark and dirty rabbit hole and had to backtrack. I play it fast and loose with saving so I was able to go back to where I branched and unscrew my mistake. I know there is a lot of support around native version control but just wanted to share my 2 cents RE this topic.

Other than (looking for) temp files, don't make any more edits or saves to the file you do have. Send it to our support team (safe.com/support) and get them to look at it (or ask them to get a developer to look at it). Sometimes it might look like items are missing, but they are in the file somewhere and Workbench just isn't showing them. It might (and I stress the "might") be possible to get something back.

This article chronicles the origins of Fluent, a pioneering Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) code in the 1980s that became the dominant market leader by the late 90s and is today part of ANSYS Inc., one of the leading simulation software providers for engineering.

In 1979, Jim Swithenbank, at the time Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Sheffield, invited Boysan back to Sheffield to help him develop a code capable of interactively defining geometry and boundary conditions for a specific problem involving cyclone separators. The resulting software was developed with a student, Bill Ayers as part of his final year research project and was published in the Transactions of the Institute of Chemical Engineers. With the permission of the authors, the editor of the publication added a note that readers could contact the authors to obtain a copy of the source code. Swithenbank and Boysan were surprised to receive several hundred requests for the code, alerting them to the commercial potential of an interactive CFD code.

The picture is specific to what was the Fluent Europe entity, by local artist, Joe Scarborough, commissioned in 2000 when the company moved to its new premises next to Sheffield Airport (there was an airport) and tracking the history from Sheffield University.

The Sheffield University building on Mappin Street (top left) was where the early version of Fluent was developed. Next to that (narrow red building) is the original office on West Street when Fluent Europe was opened. It was in a few rooms above a book shop, where Ferit Boyson and Bill Ayres worked alongside a very large computer (physically, although not necessarily in terms of computational capacity). The supertram system was installed on West Street when the office was there, creating huge disruption to the center of Sheffield. The advertising hoarding for Rolls-Royce is a nod to them being the largest customer at that time.

Then on the right are the gardens and rear of Holmwood House, the building on Cortworth Road where Fluent Europe moved to in the 90s during expansion. The gardens of Holmwood House show families enjoying picnics - at that time there were a lot of people in the company starting to have families and the summer BBQ was typically a party in the garden. I haven't been able to find out anything about the greenhouse. When Holmwood House was sold, it was bought by one of the band members of the one-time popular rock combo Def Leopard.

Towards the bottom on the left, you can see a few local details: Jessop's Hospital (just captured at the far-left) showing an expectant couple (again a reference to the number of young families) and the Red Deer pub that was a likely source of inspiration for those at Sheffield University due to its location next to Mappin Street and later a place that Fluent staff frequented. The football pitch is either capturing the 5-a-side team (that played late 90s to early 00s) or a local acknowledgement to Hallam FC - the oldest ground in the world.

Ayers showed the code to Combustion Engineering and Battelle Laboratories in the United States and both companies bought the source code for a few thousand dollars. Swithenbank and Boysan met with the Sheffield University finance director and legal officer and asked if the university wanted to invest in commercializing the code. Searching for an example to explain the business proposition to non-technical people, they pointed to a building in Sheffield which had been designed with a decorative pool. After the building was completed, the flow of air around the building splashed water onto pedestrians and made it necessary to pave over the pool. Swithenbank and Boysan said that Tempest could calculate the flow around the building and predict such problems in advance. The university officials, however, were alarmed to hear this and envisioned the building collapsing and the university being deluged with litigation. They told the erstwhile entrepreneurs that the university wanted nothing to do with their software.

Another key decision was to bundle all physics models and solvers in Fluent and to offer it for a single annual lease price. At that time, the market leader CHAM, offered a menu of various modules and solvers -- each at their own price. Customers found it hard to determine what solvers and modules they needed upfront, so found Fluent's single all-in-one price attractive when considering investing in a new technology.

Patel avoided a head-on assault on CHAM by focusing the initial marketing effort on combustion and particularly gas turbines. He asked Boysan and Ayers to add physical models to handle the movement of entrained droplets and particles and to integrate these models into the interactive user interface which set the new software apart.

Fluent used multiple field teams, each focused on selling Fluent to a specific industry segment. These field teams were multi-disciplinary (sales. marketing, customer support and consulting) and they were managed as individual profit centers. "The early team leaders gained a lot of experience in developing a profitable business and many went on to successful management positions at Fluent and elsewhere," Subbiah said.

Boysan and Ayers remained in Sheffield and did most of the development work through the 1980s. When a problem arose, Patel called Boysan, sometimes in the middle of the night, and Boysan got up and tried to figure out what was going wrong. Boteb became the European distributor of Fluent and was eventually purchased by Fluent and re-christened it Fluent Europe.

The original Fluent code was a cartesian mesh program which meant that meshes could not be applied to arbitrary computer aided design (CAD) geometries but rather had to be stair-stepped in areas where the boundary was curved. After a few abortive efforts, Boysan, Sergio Vasquez and Kanchan Kelkar developed a boundary fitted version of Fluent in the early 1990s.

Another limitation of early Fluent was that it utilized structured meshes which were labor intensive in terms of mesh generation and not well suited to modeling complex geometries or capturing flow physics efficiently.

"The Fluent founders made many courageous decisions," Subbiah said. One that sticks in my mind was the decision not to pursue block-structured meshing. In the early 1990s, Fluent was a single block code while competitors were offering multi-block solutions that offered significantly greater flexibility in meshing. Although there was strong market pressure on management to develop multi-block technology in Fluent, management decided to leapfrog them by investing in automated, unstructured technology - which, at that time, was largely unproven. This calculated risk led to Fluent leading the industry with the first release of automated unstructured meshing."

The IPO also made it possible to issue stock options to employees and acquire several competitive CFD software companies to obtain their technology and engineering teams. These included Fluid Dynamics International and its FIDAP general purpose CFD software, and Polyflow S.A., whose Polyflow CFD software was designed to handle laminar viscoelastic flows. In January 2000, Willis Stein & Partners, a private equity investment firm, acquired the Aavid Thermal Technologies business unit. Meanwhile, Fluent sales grew from $8 million in 1995 to $100 million in 2004.

In May 2006, Fluent Inc. was acquired by ANSYS, Inc., a computer aided engineering software company that up to that point specialized in solid mechanics simulation. A product tree showing ANSYS CFD acquisitions is shown in Figure 4. When ANSYS acquired Fluent, the two companies were roughly equal in revenues and as a result, former Fluent employees had a considerable influence on the operation of the combined company.

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