ANSYS Products 2026 R1

About this release

This is the whole simulation catalogue rather than a single solver. Structural and thermal analysis, computational fluid dynamics, electromagnetics, optics, semiconductor and systems tools all install from one place and share the same geometry, meshing and results environment, which is the difference between running a coupled study and exporting files between four applications and hoping the units match.

Workbench holds it together. A project is a schematic of linked blocks, so geometry feeds mesh, mesh feeds solver, solver feeds results, and changing an upstream block marks everything downstream as out of date rather than silently producing a stale answer. Parameters promote to the project level, which is what makes design of experiments and optimisation studies practical instead of manual.

Meshing is where most simulation time actually goes, and the tools reflect it. Automatic methods handle clean geometry, and the manual controls cover inflation layers for boundary flow, sizing by face or body, sweep and multizone methods for structured regions, and quality reporting that shows where the mesh will hurt the solution before hours of solve time are spent.

The solvers scale from a workstation to a cluster with the same setup, and the results environment covers contour plots, streamlines, animations, path and surface probes and automated report generation. Scripting reaches the whole stack so a parametric study or a repeated validation case runs without anybody sitting in front of it.

What it does

One environment for many physics

Structural, thermal, fluid, electromagnetic and systems tools sharing geometry, meshing and results.

Workbench project schematic

Linked blocks that mark downstream stages out of date when anything upstream changes.

Deep meshing control

Automatic methods plus inflation layers, sizing, sweep and multizone, with quality reporting before solving.

Coupled studies

Pass loads and results between physics without exporting files or reconciling units by hand.

Parametric and optimisation studies

Promote parameters to the project and run design of experiments and optimisation passes automatically.

Scripting throughout

The whole stack is scriptable for repeated validation and unattended parametric work.

Changed in this version

• Solver performance improvements across the structural and fluid families.
• Meshing gains faster automatic methods on dirty imported geometry.
• Results environment adds better handling of very large transient datasets.
• Updated geometry import for recent versions of the major design systems.
• Improved multi core scaling on high core count workstations.

System requirements

Install order

1. Unpack the archive to a short path on a drive with plenty of free space.
2. Install the licensing component first and let it start its service.
3. Run the product installer and select only the physics you need to keep the footprint down.
4. Launch Workbench once and set the results and scratch folders to a fast drive.

Worth knowing before you start

File details