What's new in PHOENICS: TR006

Contents of 'What's new in PHOENICS April 2008'

Changes Common to VR Editor and VR Viewer

Changes to VR Editor

Changes to the Earth Solver

Changes to VR Viewer

Changes Common to VR Editor and VR Viewer

• Separate increment size for each direction.

The 'increment' determines:

• how far the probe will move,
• how far an object will move
• by how much the object size will change

each time the up/down arrows are pressed. When the domain sizes are very different in each direction, say in a tunnel, the use of a single increment size made it hard to control this satisfactorily. There are now separate increment sizes in each direction.

• Snap-to-grid feature - when ticked, objects change size and move in multiples of 'increment'. The position must also be a multiple of 'increment'. This can make it easier to ensure that objects always line up thus eliminating spuriously thin cells.
• The drawing of objects in wireframe has been extended to a per-object basis. The 'master' wire-frame toggle operates on the selected object(s), reverting to all objects if none are selected.
• When the grid mesh display was on, the grid mesh dialog would appear for a mouse-click anywhere on the screen. It now appears only when the mouse is over the mesh. In addition, objects can still be selected from the screen when the grid mesh display is on by holding down the Ctrl key.

Changes to VR Editor

• Objects can be tagged to extend to the domain end.

They can also be tagged to always lie at the domain end.

This makes changing the domain size easier as tagged objects will follow automatically.

• For the WIND_PROFILE object, the profile starts in the first un-blocked cell in each column. Previously it always started at the lower boundary of the object. This makes it easier to introduce wind profiles over terrain objects, as shown simply below:

• In FLAIR, the fire and smoke dialogs have been updated to use current standards terminology. The Smoke Settings dialog now refers to Heat of Combustion, Particulate smoke yield and Mass specific extinction coefficient. These values can be found in references such as the CIBSE Guide E.

• In FLAIR diffuser objects can be rotated about any axes. Previously they had to align with the grid.
• The InForm Editor (now renamed Save Block Editor) and other TCL-based utilities such as Facetfix are now supplied as executables, so there is no need to install TCL.

Changes to the Earth Solver

• MOFOR has been enabled in parallel PHOENICS.
• CVD has been enabled in parallel PHOENICS.
• To reference the value of a variable at a specific location, the physical co-ordinates can be enclosed in {}, for example the temperature at (3.2,5.8,2.5) is TEM1{3.2&5.8&2.5). Previously only cell locations could be given as TEM1[3&8&5].
• A better initial guess at the size of the F array required for the case has been provided. If a further expansion fails due to lack of memory, a scratch file is used for temporary storage. This allows bigger cases to run on 32-bit systems without adjustment of CHAM.INI.
• The use of material >= 299 for blockage causes cut cells to be treated as blocked and opens un-cut cells. The image shows the detection of a variety of curved surfaces.

Changes to VR Viewer

• The handling of PHOTON-style PLINE elements has been added.
• Images can be saved as jpg files, in addition to the previous options of gif, bmp and pcx.