"With our latest release of EFD.Lab, NIKA continues its philosophy of obtaining higher fluid flow simulation efficiency and satisfying user requests," explained Roland Feldhinkel, CEO, NIKA GmbH. More than 80 % of the new features included in EFD.Lab 3.0 are based on customer and prospect suggestions. "The addition of Non-Newtonian analysis allows our customers to conduct simulations that more accurately represent real-life operating conditions."

• Non-Newtonian Analysis: Non-Newtonian fluids have a decreased resistance to flow when force is added. An example of a Non-Newtonian fluid is ketchup, which flows very slowly unless the back of the bottle is hit. Many manufacturers in the food packaging, plastics processing and medical devices industries need to simulate Non-Newtonian fluid flow to obtain efficient flow and thus reduce their manufacturing costs.

• Radiative heat transfer: Radiation analysis refers to the study of energy movement in the form of heat via transmission of electromagnetic waves through space. This type of analysis is especially important for applications with high temperature differences; for example, simulation and heat management in consumer appliances or projectors. In addition, it can serve as an indispensable tool for the design of efficient modern glass and steel buildings.

• Enhanced pre- and postprocessing: EFD.Lab 3.0 now features user-defined visualization parameters such as industry-specific coefficients. It also features a new Report Generator for comprehensive documentation of analysis results.

• Optimized underlying kernel technologies: The EFD.Lab engine has been further fine-tuned to ensure an even faster processing speed.

The analysis capabilities of EFD.Lab include incompressible (liquid or gas) or compressible (gas) flows, laminar, turbulent, steady-state and transient flows, surface roughness, conjugated heat transfer, particle tracking, and many more physical models.

EFD.Lab is mainly used for the development and optimization of various products such as automotive parts, computer housings, switching units, electronic devices, HVAC systems, valves and regulators, medical equipment, in addition to the building and fire protection industries. EFD.Lab includes a preprocessor with parametric solid modeling of the geometry, and a powerful postprocessor for easy processing and visualization of results. The preprocessor imports native CAD files from the most important CAD systems and supports numerous standard file formats. The CAD geometry of a design can be directly used without modeling a separate domain of the flow space. This unique feature combined with automatic mesh generation and solver convergence controls allow the engineer to take advantage of fully integrated flow simulation within the design cycle.