Future Facilities launches Release 16 of its leading CFD and digital twin software

Future Facilities has launched Release 16 of its industry-leading Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software and digital twin technology, 6SigmaDCX. The updates will deliver improved performance, accuracy and speed to support a broad range of data centre teams in decision-making and achieving sustainable success. 

The new 6SigmaDCX offers a range of features to enhance data centre design and operations as highly requested by customers. 

The key design highlights include: 

• Enhanced view developments which enable users to showcase photorealistic results in reports and facilitate animation creation.
• Improvements to the 1D Flow Network to ensure fast, detailed thermal flow analysis of the liquid and air flow routes.
• New result views and object configurations, such as Isosurfaces, which deliver innovative ways to visualise external models and empower risk analysis at any stage of design.
• The ability to import BIM models directly into 6SigmaDCX for faster model creation. 
• Performance improvements, namely Future Facilities’ new back tracing method, ensuring solar radiation calculations solve up to 30 times faster.

While operations improvements include:                                                                      

• Improved, customisable dashboards and charts offering new insights and opportunities for team communication and collaboration. 
• Possibility of viewing 6SigmaRoom simulation reports within 6SigmaAccess so less time is spent moving between toolsets. 
• New views, editable objects and automations to enhance power analysis and configuration decisions.  
• Simplified model upkeep with new CAD import and exports, as well as user interface improvements.
• New automations, including creating, uploading and solving a model and querying results, through the command line using 6SigmaCommander. 

Thanks to these new features, 6SigmaDCX can better support a wide range of industry sectors. For example, colocation data centres are empowered to operate confidently, optimise capacity utilisation and mitigate risk. Enterprise data centres get a consolidated view of the information they care most about to enable decision-making. Data centre consultants can meet project timelines with ease thanks to the accelerated model build and design process. Vendors can focus on perfecting thermal design with equipment analysis simplified through integrations and intelligent objects. 

Mark Fenton, Product Manager at Future Facilities, said: “The aspirational goal for Release 16 was to deliver software that satisfied the want of our customers. We collaborated with users across all sectors to dig into the features that would make a difference in their day-to-day lives, whether that meant easier model builds, quicker solution times, automated and customisable reporting or just the good feeling you get from using great software.”