1.1.3 Starting ANSYS FLUENT on a Windows System

There are two ways to start ANSYS FLUENT on a Windows system:

• Click the Start button, select the All Programs menu, select the ANSYS 12.0 menu, and then select the Fluent 12 program item. (Note that if the default "ANSYS 12.0'' program group name was changed when ANSYS FLUENT was installed, you will find the Fluent 12 menu item in the program group with the new name that was assigned, rather than in the ANSYS 12.0 program group.) This option starts FLUENT Launcher (see Section  1.1.2).

• Start from a Command Prompt window by typing fluent 2d (for the 2D single-precision solver), fluent 3d (for the 3D single-precision solver), fluent 2ddp (for the 2D double-precision solver), or fluent 3ddp (for the 3D double-precision solver) at the prompt. Before doing so, however, you must first modify your user environment so that the Command utility will find fluent. You can do this by selecting the program item "Set Environment'', which is also found in the ANSYS 12.0 program group. This program will add the ANSYS 12.0 folder to your command search path.

  From the Command Prompt window, you can also start the parallel version of ANSYS FLUENT. To start the parallel version on x processors, type fluent version -tx at the prompt, replacing version with the desired solver version ( 2d, 3d, 2ddp, or 3ddp) and x with the number of processors (e.g., fluent 3d -t4 to run the 3D version on 4 processors). For information about the parallel version of ANSYS FLUENT for Windows, see Section  32.3.