121 The linear material model – which included 1.8 million nodes – was run in Ansys Cloud on an HC-series virtual machine of Microsoft Azure featuring 44 Intel Xeon Platinum 8168 processor cores. Using Ansys Cloud, the simulation was completed in one hour, compared to five hours on company workstations. Finite element simulations subsequently confirmed that the LT1500 crane climbing the tower would not cause any deformation of the wind turbine tower. Being able to set up these large models to run as a single simulation on Ansys Cloud made for a better and safer design. Instead of splitting the analysis up into multiple simulations and then having to calculate the interface forces, Liftra engineers were able to do everything in the same simulation. “Previously we were forced to do more simplification and isolate parts to perform calculations on each separate part,” said Miguel Hoffmann, senior engineer specialist at Liftra. “Now, we can simulate the entire global assembly as a whole.” Liftra found that the best simulation set-up was a combination of Ansys Cloud, Ansys Elastic Licensing and its own licenses. With design offices in Spain and in Denmark, the firm found it useful to be able to borrow licenses and avoid waiting until someone finishes a simulation before starting something new. A cost analysis also revealed many barriers to Liftra maintaining its own on-premises cluster. These included maintenance costs and the need for extra licenses. Using Ansys Cloud provided a considerably less expensive option while also delivering higher computing power, allowing Liftra to run many parallel jobs with almost unlimited power. “Thanks to Ansys Cloud we can solve more complex models faster than ever,” said Hoffmann. “Delivering on time is very important, but delivering an improved, safer, optimised design is even better. Thanks to Ansys Cloud, we can achieve more complex designs and simulate more complete models up to five times faster.” Liftra’s LT1500 crane ‘climbs’ a wind turbine tower as it is being assembled MANU FAC TUR I NG & R E SOUR C E S
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