Opera-14: Electromagnetic Software for Designing…
The latest version of the popular Opera finite element software (Opera-14) includes several ground-breaking new ways to design and model your electromagnetic systems!
The release also includes some useful additions that will make the process even more accurate and streamlined.
The more prominent developments include:
- Mosaic meshing - New
- Electrical machines design - New
- Surface impedance boundary condition - New
- Graphical Circuit Editor - New
- Advanced Scala - Improved and re-packaged
- Shorter solution times - New direct sparse solvers available for Opera-2d
- Opera Manager and Optimizer - Extensively modified
- Opera-2d Pre-Processor - Improved functionality
- Enhanced command language - Even greater automation
- Wildcard solver licence - More flexibility, less cost
- Opera-2d DE (Design Environment) – End of Life announcement
For more information or to order now please contact sales at vectorfields.sales@cobham.com or call us on +44 (0) 1865 370151.
For information on installing or upgrading to Opera-14 please click here.
Mosaic Meshing
A new mesh generator for Opera-3d can use a mixture of hexahedral, prismatic and tetrahedral elements termed ‘mosaic meshing’. If desired, the 3d software will automatically assign the most suitable element type to each volume in an Opera model according to its shape.
Mosaic meshing is a significant advancement over the tetrahedral mesh produced by the previous mesh generator. The additional mesh element types can lead to improved reliability, accuracy and computational speed.
Control of mesh parameters is both easy and flexible. For example, an increase in hexahedral mesh density to capture currents within a few skin depths of a surface can be specified through mesh layering using a single surface parameter.
Electrical Machines Design
Opera-3d now includes the “virtual work” method for calculating forces and torques. This is in addition to existing methods of calculation using Maxwell stress and/or integral fields. Virtual work calculations can provide better accuracy and shorter solution times for some machines.
A new Opera-3d Electrical Machines Environment greatly reduces the effort and time required to create and simulate models of electric motors and generators. The new release includes the following types of machine: induction, synchronous, brushless, PMDC, and switched reluctance.
Surface Impedance Boundary Condition
A new surface impedance boundary condition for Elektra/SS can be used to calculate eddy currents in the surface of conducting materials without the requirement for a dense volume mesh close to the surface.
The surface impedance boundary condition is the most efficient and accurate method to use for any good electrical conductor for which the electrical conductivity and magnetic permeability are linear and isotropic or may be assumed so.
Graphical Circuit Editor
The graphical Circuit Editor has been fully integrated into both the 2d Pre-Processor and the 3d Modeller. It provides an easy-to-use tool for defining circuits that drive Opera models. The tool is also available in the 2d and 3d post processors for interrogating circuit results after an Opera simulation; for example, hovering the cursor over a component in the circuit will cause the current through and voltage across the component to be displayed.
In addition to the Circuit Editor, the Opera Simulink® connection is available for including Opera models within Simulink®. The connection module is available for both Windows® and Linux users.
Advanced Scala
Various improvements have been made to the advanced features of the particle beam solver (Scala). We now offer the enhanced “Scala Volume” emission model as a separate module as well as a Maxwell distributed velocity emission surface (with random velocity-space sampling of emerging particles), improvements in accuracy and increased flexibility in the definition of emitters.
Shorter solution times
Get the answer up to ten times faster!
New direct sparse solvers are available for all Opera-2d solution modules. The solvers can be used to reduce solution times considerably. Whilst the benefits of these solvers are problem dependent, typical users can expect a five to ten fold speed up over the standard iterative solvers.
Examples:
- Static Solver - a large model (368k elements, 736k nodes) solves 12 times faster
(1:32 instead of 19:41 on Core i7) - Steady State Solver - a standard size model (73k nodes, 145k elements) solves 2 times faster
(0:45 instead of 1:36 on Core i7)
Opera Manager and Optimizer
The Opera Manager and Optimizer have been extensively modified to improve reliability and accuracy for finding optimal designs. A key aspect of this is the ability to handle the many jobs that are automatically created by the Optimizer and run using the Opera Manager’s batch facility. We have run over 25,000 jobs through the batch queue in one session with the Manager running on a server with access to several other computers.
Opera-2d Pre-Processor
A number of enhancements have been added to the Opera-2d Pre-Processor, including overlaying regions and automatic gap-layering for rotating machines. Along with conductor replication without the loss of individual conductor identity and the integration with the Circuit Editor the Opera-2d software is now more flexible than ever.
Enhanced Command Language
One distinctive feature of the Opera software suite is the built-in command language.
Opera automatically generates command (.comi) files containing a record of the commands used within a design process. With little effort these files may be customised to facilitate structured engineering management that can include quality assurance and a high level of automation for subsequent design iterations.
For the release of Opera-14 we have made improvements in the flexibility and ease of use of the command language as well as adding a whole host of new features. These include:
- Automatic equation solving
- A new (easier) way to create user variables
- Scoped (local) variables
- Cycling a loop
- Exiting a loop ignoring any intervening commands
- Using Opera dialogs in your Command Files
- Increased limits of character string lengths
- Longer commands and responses
- Longer labels and names
Wildcard Solver Licence
In addition to the product enhancements we are making available a new solver licence type called “wildcard”. A wildcard is a floating solver license that can be used to run any solver that is licensed on a seat. For example, if you have a seat that includes TOSCA, ELEKTRA and a wildcard, then the wildcard can be used as an additional TOSCA or ELEKTRA solver licence when required.