Ansys Rocky
Particle Dynamics Simulation Software

The multi-GPU solver in Rocky distributes and manages the combined memory of two or more GPU cards within a single motherboard, overcoming memory limitations and achieving a substantial performance increase by aggregating computing power. Rocky can speed up your particle simulations and help facilitate large-scale simulations involving tens of millions of particles.

Rocky enables you to simulate a system with real particle shapes and sizes, specifying both spherical and truly non-spherical particle shapes, including shells and fibers. You can set up particle groups with particle size distributions and mix simulations of different particle shapes. Rocky comes with default shapes that you can use out-of-the-box or modify to match your particles. You can also define and import your own custom shapes. Fiber particles in Rocky can be of any length, flexible or rigid, and can be breakable. 

Engineers need to assess to interaction of fluid and particles in many applications.  Rocky coupled with Ansys Fluent creates a powerful workflow for modeling fluid systems.  Specially for non-spherical particles or for systems with particle size distribution, engineers can create a multiphysics simulation by coupling CFD and DEM. CFD-DEM coupling can be used in two different ways:

• When the fluid field affects the particle flow, but the particles don’t affect the fluid flow
• When the fluid flow affects the motion of particles and the particles in turn affect the motion of the fluid

Coupling DEM with FEA, engineers can simulate transient cases while incorporating geometry motion and time-varying loads on boundary elements.

During simulation, Rocky tracks the loads on each node of a geometry mesh. These loads are then exported as a pressure field for further analysis with Ansys Mechanical. The FEA software then discretizes the geometry and solves for the equilibrium conditions.

Rocky enables solutions of particle flow affected by electromagnetic fields by coupling with Ansys Maxwell.  Electric particles can experience three types of phenomena, with particles being influenced by electromagnetic fields, electrostatic fields or tribocharging.  The magnetic fields calculated by EM solvers are imported as point clouds into Rocky. The resulting calculations show the particle flow, including particle attraction depending on the charge. 

Rocky gives you the freedom to configure complex geometry movements by enabling as many translational, rotational, vibrational, swinging, crushing and free-body motions as you need. The fully integrated motion kernel offers support for combined geometry motions within the software.

Whether you want to prescribe exact movements or have your geometry components move freely in response to outside forces like particle contacts and gravity, Rocky has your complex motion needs covered. For more complex motions with that combine the effects of loads and mechanics, Rocky can be coupled to Ansys Motion. 

Rocky’s unique, discrete breakage model is a high-fidelity model that considers the collision location at the particle’s surface along with its consequent internal stresses, capturing shape-dependent breakage and crack propagation.

Unlike most DEM codes that use a combination of spheres connected to each other to approximate a particle shape, Rocky uses tetrahedra, allowing for representation of any particle shape while preserving volume and mass. Thus, it can simulate breakage for particles of any shape and aspect ratio: fibers, shells and custom-shaped particles.

The SPH (Smoothed-Particle Hydrodynamics) is a method to model fluids in fluid-particle simulations. This Lagrangian mesh-free method helps account for the fluid effect on particles in problems with high solid content and free surface flows.​

Powered by a computationally efficient GPU-based solver, SPH is fully integrated into Rocky UI.