Case Study: Rolls‑Royce achieves 80% reduction in coupled CFD–structural simulation time with ANSYS

Rolls-Royce reduces the time required for a coupled CFD–structural simulation by 80 percent using cloud computing

Rolls Royce needed to accelerate thermal–structural design for jet engines by eliminating late-stage physical sensor measurements and instead predicting heat flux with coupled simulations. The company sought to couple its proprietary structural solver with ANSYS Fluent CFD, but on‑premises HPC was at capacity — creating a bottleneck that delayed design iterations and made early thermal optimization impractical. ANSYS (Fluent and ANSYS HPC Pack) was the core software used in this effort.

Using ANSYS Fluent and ANSYS HPC Pack on cloud HPC resources (provisioned via CPU 24/7), the team ran the coupled fluid–structure workflow in cycles — Fluent on 32 cores and the structural solver on one — with elastic, on‑demand compute. The ANSYS-based cloud solution cut coupled simulation time by 80% and delivered five times faster wall‑clock performance versus a local workstation, enabling early iterative optimization of cooling and sealing designs and avoiding costly late-stage redesigns.

Rolls Royce

Marius Swoboda

Head of Design Systems Engineering