Mentor Graphics Announces FloVENT v8 with New Technology Specifically Targeted at Design Engineers

WILSONVILLE, Ore - Mentor Graphics Corporation today announced the release of the FloVENT® v8 solution with significant enhancements in heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) model creation, solution performance and results visualization. These enhancements to the already well proven technology of the FloVENT tool enable design engineers of built environments, data centers and clean rooms to quickly set up build scenarios and accurately analyze them for proper cooling, heating, contamination control and ventilation. The result is higher productivity for the designer and the ability to run more “what-if” variants, thus converging on the best design possible.

“With an easy-to-use interface, reliable CFD engine, and advanced features like automatic calculation of Capture Index, the FloVENT solution is our primary tool for developing real-time cooling calculators for our advanced data center design and management software,” stated Jim VanGilder, P.E, senior mechanical engineer, American Power Conversion, Inc.

The FloVENT software is a powerful Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) product that predicts 3D airflow, heat transfer and contamination distribution in buildings of all types and sizes. The FloVENT tool’s fast and easy-to-use menu system is designed specifically for engineers involved in the design and optimization of built environments and HVAC systems. Typical FloVENT applications include atriums, shopping malls, office buildings, telephone exchanges and data centers, theaters, airport terminals, storage facilities and warehouses, passenger comfort in vehicles, air quality and contaminant control in laboratories, research facilities, hospitals and underground car parks. The FloVENT tool enables engineers to minimize energy consumption as well as eliminate airflow problems or hazards early in the design process before building construction or refurbishment begins.

“We found that applying FloVENT airflow modeling technology in the design of our clients’ clean rooms has proved beneficial for reduction of capital costs,” stated Andy Solbert, design engineer, Advanced Design and Simulation Group at CH2MHill. “As well, this has led to new design innovations such as new concepts for 300mm manufacturing environments.”

Major Enhancements
Among the many enhancements in the FloVENT v8 release, three stand out as particularly noteworthy:

* The “Zoom-In” feature enables a designer to select a region of a model and create a more complex micro-model for that section, including boundary conditions from previous analyses. Then a more detailed study can be performed on that section without carrying the overhead of the full-system level model.
* An improved radiative exchange factor solver results in up to a 40x improvement in execution times for larger design models. This radically reduces the time required to calculate the effects of radiative heat exchange.
* A “Cold and Hot Aisle Capture Index”* enables designers to efficiently analyze the cooling performance in data centers containing models of racks, local cooling resources (e.g. perforated floor tiles or local coolers), and local air extracts (e.g., return vents).

Availability
The FloVENT v8 software is available for immediate shipment.