Modine Conquers Complex Transient CFD with Rescale: Customer Interview with Modine Manufacturing

We talked to two CFD engineers at Modine Manufacturing Company, an international company that designs, manufactures, and tests heat transfer solutions, to talk about how their company uses Rescale, their motivation for computing on the cloud, and their expectations for how Rescale will impact their design process in the future. Read the conversation below to hear how they’re using Rescale to expand their CFD simulations to larger, complex transient models while actually saving time.


Rescale: Please introduce yourself and describe your role within Modine organization.
John: My name is John Iselin. I’m a technical advisor, and I primarily do computational fluid dynamics analysis and provide feedback to our application and product development engineers as to how they might improve their design based on results of CFD simulations.
Victor: And my name is Victor Niño, I’m the virtual technology manager. I oversee all the simulation activity in computational fluid dynamics and finite element analysis, as well as performance model developments and durability and test development.

“Running a transient simulation on ten cores takes us about three months, but with Rescale we could do it in a few days.”
– Victor Niño, Virtual Technology Manager, Modine

Rescale: Can you describe Modine and give some examples of Modine’s product line?
Victor: At Modine, we provide heat transfer management solutions. We serve a lot of industries, including automotive, agriculture equipment, and construction equipment. Another big portion of Modine’s business is HVAC. We focus on designing heat transfer components and systems.
Rescale: Okay, and the product line includes things like radiators and transmission oil coolers?
Victor: Yeah, exactly. We’ll provide radiators, charge-air coolers for diesel engines, oil coolers, exhaust gas recirculation coolers, condensers and evaporators for air-conditioning systems, and battery coolers for electric vehicles.
John: Our primary business is in extended surface heat exchangers.
Rescale: Can you describe your simulation needs and your computing environment before you started using Rescale?
John: We’ve got relatively large workstation computing systems. In North America, we don’t have an in-house grid type of computing environment. Our typical workstations have 10 cores and 64 gigabytes of memory. Memory and computing bandwidth constrain the amount of parallelization we can use in our simulations.
Victor: Modine Germany has a grid that is updated every five years. The current grid has 32 processors with initial plans of additional expansion.
Rescale: Could you talk a little bit more about the pain points that led you to explore other options, including Rescale?
Victor:  It’s basically a computer limitation. We want to eliminate assumptions in our models, which adds complexity and increases the model size.  Also, we want to do a lot more transient simulations, which are more complex models that take a long time, but it’s basically impossible to run transient simulations on our computers. Running a transient simulation on ten cores takes us about three months, but with Rescale we could do it in few days.
John:  Right now, we’re developing methodologies to do conjugate transient simulations. We realized that we didn’t have the computing power, and Rescale allowed us to quickly investigate some of these methodologies without having to purchase our own computing equipment, which would have significantly delayed our development. Time savings is a big driving factor in using Rescale.

“We are now able to simulate the transient nature of the heat exchanger with CFD thanks to the unlimited cores that Rescale provides… We can also do it fast. Now we’re actually providing better results in a very reasonable time.”
– Victor Niño, Virtual Technology Manager, Modine

Rescale: What ultimately led you to select Rescale as your test platform?
Victor: It was a word-of-mouth recommendation. I talked to other CFD engineers at a STAR-CCM+ seminar, sharing our experiences and pain points. The CD-adapco representative said there are a few [cloud] services that you could use. He recommended Rescale based on feedback from other CFD engineers because it is easy to use—easy to upload files and use the GUI without coding.
Rescale: Victor, how important was the GUI in enabling you to do testing? Is the GUI important to the engineering community at Modine, or are you all familiar with command line interfaces?
Victor: I’m not a code developer. I just want to upload, hit a button, get my answer, and then download it—and that’s it. From a management standpoint, I really like that you guys say up front how much it’s going to cost per hour and you can put limits on how much time we want to run so we won’t go over budget. We also have control on the budget. Rescale has very good management capabilities, and that’s very helpful.
Rescale:  How was your experience opening your Rescale account and running initial tests from the beginning?
Victor:  The free trial was very useful. I used it to run a very quick transient simulation to compare how long it would take to run on Rescale. The second model I ran on Rescale was something that a customer needed. It was a really big model that would have taken us three months to run as a transient model, but we were able to run it in a few days on Rescale. The customer was very pleased with our time, especially because we’re providing more detailed results than before.
Rescale: Talk a little bit more about the types of simulations you’re running on Rescale, the size of those jobs, core counts and types, etc.
Victor: We purchased STAR-CCM+’s Power On Demand licensing. They give us unlimited cores per hour. I have exclusively run transient conjugate heat transfer CFD. My measures are about 18 million cells. I want to run my simulations as fast as possible. Each second matters because transient simulation takes a long time. My licenses give me access to unlimited cores, so I have run about 500 cores in a job, for example. We use Onyx and Nickel core types.
Rescale: How has Rescale changed the way you approach simulation at your company?
John: It’s given us the possibility of doing things that we just couldn’t do before or that were unrealistic because of their time scale. For example, we just couldn’t tie up one of our workstations for two weeks just to grind through a large problem. Rescale has allowed us to respond to our customers in an appropriate fashion.
Rescale:  It sounds like faster time to market with your products—getting your results back to your customers faster—is the biggest benefit that you’re getting. What about enhanced product development? How has making your models more complex impacted the work that you’re doing?
Victor: We knew that transient CFD was the way to improve our methodology. It’s just that we didn’t have the capability, and you guys provided a platform where we could run [transient] simulations in a very short time. For example, with EGR (exhaust gas recirculation), exhaust gas gets piped back to the cylinders, but the gas first has to be cooled down using some coolant. EGR has thermal gradients that create a lot of thermal stresses. There are a lot of failures due to thermal expansion and contraction. We should be able to model that. We are now able to simulate the transient nature of the heat exchanger with CFD thanks to the unlimited cores that Rescale provides. Not only are we able to simulate transient behavior, but we can also do it fast. Now we’re actually providing better results in a very reasonable time. We’re getting rid of a lot of assumptions by going to a transient simulation. Basically, Rescale has allowed us to model the transient nature of the problem.

“The things we’ve learned through transient CFD analysis on Rescale have helped us create better products with a lower failure rate.”
– John Iselin, Technical Advisor, Modine

Rescale: Do you think this is going to have any impact on the amount of physical testing that your research center has to do?
Victor: Oh, simulation is definitely the way to go. Our goal is to do as much simulation within the company as possible. As you’re saying, faster time to market. We’ll save on prototyping and testing. Our goal here as a group is to know a lot about our products before they’re built. With Rescale’s platform allowing us to run these simulations faster, we are starting to see this impact [on the amount of physical testing we do].
John: Our work up until now has improved the quality of our products, but it hasn’t allowed us to cut back on physical prototype testing yet. As we’re able to model our products in a more realistic way, and as our development engineers realize that the simulations are getting the same results as the physical tests, they’re going to reduce physical testing. The things we’ve learned through transient CFD analysis on Rescale have helped us create better products with a lower failure rate.
Rescale: Can you comment on how you see Modine using Rescale in the future?
Victor: Our finite element analysis group is the same story as CFD, just different equations. They also want to add complexity to their models, but because of the limitations of the computers, they are not able to. They’re using lot of linear calculations, but they want to go to non-linear to have better resolution on their calculations. I see the same story happening in the FEA side as well.
John: We make some HVAC products that are sold in California, which has very strict noise requirements on air handling equipment, and I know Modine would like to be able to do some aero-acoustic simulations. Unless we go to cloud computing, we don’t have any hope of doing those types of simulations. That work is a couple of years down the road, but now we can at least talk about it. Before, the computations would be so astronomically long that we couldn’t even think about doing it. All of a sudden, we’re able to consider doing things and exploring areas that we couldn’t consider before.
Rescale: Okay. We do have a number of acoustic-specific codes already loaded on the Rescale platform, but if it’s something that we don’t have, we’re always open to adding new codes. We can make sure that we have the specific codes that you want to run.
John: When we initially established our trial account with Rescale, you did not have the version of STAR-CCM+ that we were using at the time, and within two or three days you had installed that version of the code. We were very appreciative of your response time in getting the exact version of simulation software that we’re using. For inter-compatibility, it’s important for us to have that. We appreciated your flexibility and response time.
About Modine
Modine, with fiscal 2016 revenues of $1.4 billion (prior to the Luvata HTS acquisition), specializes in thermal management systems and components, bringing highly engineered heating and cooling technology and solutions to diversified global markets. Modine products are used in light, medium and heavy-duty vehicles, heating, ventilation and air conditioning equipment, off-highway and industrial equipment and refrigeration systems. Modine is a global company headquartered in Racine, Wisconsin (USA), with operations in North America, South America, Europe, Asia and Africa. For more information about Modine, visit www.modine.com.
Sign up for a free trial to see how Rescale can accelerate your simulations or add complexity to your models.

Modine Conquers Complex Transient CFD with Rescale: Customer Interview with Modine Manufacturing

We talked to two CFD engineers at Modine Manufacturing Company, an international company that designs, manufactures, and tests heat transfer solutions, to talk about how their company uses Rescale, their motivation for computing on the cloud, and their expectations for how Rescale will impact their design process in the future. Read the conversation below to hear how they’re using Rescale to expand their CFD simulations to larger, complex transient models while actually saving time.

Rescale: Please introduce yourself and describe your role within Modine organization.
John: My name is John Iselin. I’m a technical advisor, and I primarily do computational fluid dynamics analysis and provide feedback to our application and product development engineers as to how they might improve their design based on results of CFD simulations.
Victor: And my name is Victor Niño, I’m the virtual technology manager. I oversee all the simulation activity in computational fluid dynamics and finite element analysis, as well as performance model developments and durability and test development.

“Running a transient simulation on ten cores takes us about three months, but with Rescale we could do it in a few days.”
– Victor Niño, Virtual Technology Manager, Modine

Rescale: Can you describe Modine and give some examples of Modine’s product line?
Victor: At Modine, we provide heat transfer management solutions. We serve a lot of industries, including automotive, agriculture equipment, and construction equipment. Another big portion of Modine’s business is HVAC. We focus on designing heat transfer components and systems.
Rescale: Okay, and the product line includes things like radiators and transmission oil coolers?
Victor: Yeah, exactly. We’ll provide radiators, charge-air coolers for diesel engines, oil coolers, exhaust gas recirculation coolers, condensers and evaporators for air-conditioning systems, and battery coolers for electric vehicles.
John: Our primary business is in extended surface heat exchangers.
Rescale: Can you describe your simulation needs and your computing environment before you started using Rescale?
John: We’ve got relatively large workstation computing systems. In North America, we don’t have an in-house grid type of computing environment. Our typical workstations have 10 cores and 64 gigabytes of memory. Memory and computing bandwidth constrain the amount of parallelization we can use in our simulations.
Victor: Modine Germany has a grid that is updated every five years. The current grid has 32 processors with initial plans of additional expansion.
Rescale: Could you talk a little bit more about the pain points that led you to explore other options, including Rescale?
Victor:  It’s basically a computer limitation. We want to eliminate assumptions in our models, which adds complexity and increases the model size.  Also, we want to do a lot more transient simulations, which are more complex models that take a long time, but it’s basically impossible to run transient simulations on our computers. Running a transient simulation on ten cores takes us about three months, but with Rescale we could do it in few days.
John:  Right now, we’re developing methodologies to do conjugate transient simulations. We realized that we didn’t have the computing power, and Rescale allowed us to quickly investigate some of these methodologies without having to purchase our own computing equipment, which would have significantly delayed our development. Time savings is a big driving factor in using Rescale.

“We are now able to simulate the transient nature of the heat exchanger with CFD thanks to the unlimited cores that Rescale provides… We can also do it fast. Now we’re actually providing better results in a very reasonable time.”
– Victor Niño, Virtual Technology Manager, Modine

Rescale: What ultimately led you to select Rescale as your test platform?
Victor: It was a word-of-mouth recommendation. I talked to other CFD engineers at a STAR-CCM+ seminar, sharing our experiences and pain points. The CD-adapco representative said there are a few [cloud] services that you could use. He recommended Rescale based on feedback from other CFD engineers because it is easy to use—easy to upload files and use the GUI without coding.
Rescale: Victor, how important was the GUI in enabling you to do testing? Is the GUI important to the engineering community at Modine, or are you all familiar with command line interfaces?
Victor: I’m not a code developer. I just want to upload, hit a button, get my answer, and then download it—and that’s it. From a management standpoint, I really like that you guys say up front how much it’s going to cost per hour and you can put limits on how much time we want to run so we won’t go over budget. We also have control on the budget. Rescale has very good management capabilities, and that’s very helpful.
Rescale:  How was your experience opening your Rescale account and running initial tests from the beginning?
Victor:  The free trial was very useful. I used it to run a very quick transient simulation to compare how long it would take to run on Rescale. The second model I ran on Rescale was something that a customer needed. It was a really big model that would have taken us three months to run as a transient model, but we were able to run it in a few days on Rescale. The customer was very pleased with our time, especially because we’re providing more detailed results than before.
Rescale: Talk a little bit more about the types of simulations you’re running on Rescale, the size of those jobs, core counts and types, etc.
Victor: We purchased STAR-CCM+’s Power On Demand licensing. They give us unlimited cores per hour. I have exclusively run transient conjugate heat transfer CFD. My measures are about 18 million cells. I want to run my simulations as fast as possible. Each second matters because transient simulation takes a long time. My licenses give me access to unlimited cores, so I have run about 500 cores in a job, for example. We use Onyx and Nickel core types.
Rescale: How has Rescale changed the way you approach simulation at your company?
John: It’s given us the possibility of doing things that we just couldn’t do before or that were unrealistic because of their time scale. For example, we just couldn’t tie up one of our workstations for two weeks just to grind through a large problem. Rescale has allowed us to respond to our customers in an appropriate fashion.
Rescale:  It sounds like faster time to market with your products—getting your results back to your customers faster—is the biggest benefit that you’re getting. What about enhanced product development? How has making your models more complex impacted the work that you’re doing?
Victor: We knew that transient CFD was the way to improve our methodology. It’s just that we didn’t have the capability, and you guys provided a platform where we could run [transient] simulations in a very short time. For example, with EGR (exhaust gas recirculation), exhaust gas gets piped back to the cylinders, but the gas first has to be cooled down using some coolant. EGR has thermal gradients that create a lot of thermal stresses. There are a lot of failures due to thermal expansion and contraction. We should be able to model that. We are now able to simulate the transient nature of the heat exchanger with CFD thanks to the unlimited cores that Rescale provides. Not only are we able to simulate transient behavior, but we can also do it fast. Now we’re actually providing better results in a very reasonable time. We’re getting rid of a lot of assumptions by going to a transient simulation. Basically, Rescale has allowed us to model the transient nature of the problem.

“The things we’ve learned through transient CFD analysis on Rescale have helped us create better products with a lower failure rate.”
– John Iselin, Technical Advisor, Modine

Rescale: Do you think this is going to have any impact on the amount of physical testing that your research center has to do?
Victor: Oh, simulation is definitely the way to go. Our goal is to do as much simulation within the company as possible. As you’re saying, faster time to market. We’ll save on prototyping and testing. Our goal here as a group is to know a lot about our products before they’re built. With Rescale’s platform allowing us to run these simulations faster, we are starting to see this impact [on the amount of physical testing we do].
John: Our work up until now has improved the quality of our products, but it hasn’t allowed us to cut back on physical prototype testing yet. As we’re able to model our products in a more realistic way, and as our development engineers realize that the simulations are getting the same results as the physical tests, they’re going to reduce physical testing. The things we’ve learned through transient CFD analysis on Rescale have helped us create better products with a lower failure rate.
Rescale: Can you comment on how you see Modine using Rescale in the future?
Victor: Our finite element analysis group is the same story as CFD, just different equations. They also want to add complexity to their models, but because of the limitations of the computers, they are not able to. They’re using lot of linear calculations, but they want to go to non-linear to have better resolution on their calculations. I see the same story happening in the FEA side as well.
John: We make some HVAC products that are sold in California, which has very strict noise requirements on air handling equipment, and I know Modine would like to be able to do some aero-acoustic simulations. Unless we go to cloud computing, we don’t have any hope of doing those types of simulations. That work is a couple of years down the road, but now we can at least talk about it. Before, the computations would be so astronomically long that we couldn’t even think about doing it. All of a sudden, we’re able to consider doing things and exploring areas that we couldn’t consider before.
Rescale: Okay. We do have a number of acoustic-specific codes already loaded on the Rescale platform, but if it’s something that we don’t have, we’re always open to adding new codes. We can make sure that we have the specific codes that you want to run.
John: When we initially established our trial account with Rescale, you did not have the version of STAR-CCM+ that we were using at the time, and within two or three days you had installed that version of the code. We were very appreciative of your response time in getting the exact version of simulation software that we’re using. For inter-compatibility, it’s important for us to have that. We appreciated your flexibility and response time.
About Modine
Modine, with fiscal 2016 revenues of $1.4 billion (prior to the Luvata HTS acquisition), specializes in thermal management systems and components, bringing highly engineered heating and cooling technology and solutions to diversified global markets. Modine products are used in light, medium and heavy-duty vehicles, heating, ventilation and air conditioning equipment, off-highway and industrial equipment and refrigeration systems. Modine is a global company headquartered in Racine, Wisconsin (USA), with operations in North America, South America, Europe, Asia and Africa. For more information about Modine, visit www.modine.com.
Sign up for a free trial to see how Rescale can accelerate your simulations or add complexity to your models.