Ansys Student — The Complete Guide: Ansys’ Simulation Bundle, Free for Students
Ansys Student is a free bundle for students that includes more than 20 Ansys programs. Students use it for self-learning, coursework, projects and competitions.
Ansys Student
Ansys (Synopsys)
Ansys’ free student bundle — Mechanical, Fluent, CFX, Discovery and more, for size-limited structural, thermal and CFD analysis.
Get it from the vendorWhat you get
- Mechanical — structural and thermal finite element analysis.
- Fluent and CFX — computational fluid dynamics.
- Discovery — geometry and fast simulation at the design stage.
- Autodyn and Rocky — fast dynamics and granular material.
- optiSLang — optimisation and sensitivity analysis.
Who may use it and what is limited
The licence is for students’ educational use only — self-learning, courses, projects and demonstrations — and commercial use is not allowed. The licence is built into the software for twelve months from the release date and is renewed with each new version, so you need to update about once a year. Problem size is limited to 128K nodes or elements for structures and 1 million cells for fluids. It runs on 64-bit Windows.
Related tools
For a learning version of Abaqus — Abaqus Learning Edition. For open alternatives without limits — PrePoMax for structures and OpenFOAM for CFD.
Abaqus Learning Edition
Dassault Systèmes (SIMULIA)
A free version of Abaqus for learning nonlinear finite element analysis — for personal and educational use, on models up to 1000 nodes.
Get it from the vendor
PrePoMax
University of Maribor
Full graphical front end for CalculiX — meshing, materials, loads and results in one window.
Get it from the vendor
OpenFOAM
OpenFOAM Foundation
Comprehensive CFD solvers — flow, turbulence, heat transfer and multiphase. Text-file driven, no GUI.
Get it from the vendorSimScale (community plan)
SimScale GmbH
CFD and FEA simulation in the cloud from the browser. Community plan limited in compute hours and public.
Get it from the vendorThe bottom line
For students, this is the official free way to work with Ansys tools — size-limited and for study only.