The latest release of Adams, Adams 2019, has landed.
For you not in the know, Adams is a motion simulation package for analysing the complex behaviour of mechanical systems. With Adams you can test virtual prototypes and optimise designs for performance, safety and comfort, without having to build and test numerous physical prototypes.
With this release comes several enhancements and features, all of which can be found in the Adams 2019 Release Guide. However, to save you some time we have summarised some of the major enhancements below (There is also a YouTube video demonstrating how to use these new features):
Adams View Enhancements
- Listing of objects referencing design variables: Design Variables now have an additional info paragraph called “Referenced by”, which lists the objects in the session that references the design variable you’ve selected.
- The Associativity Browser can be accessed through the right click menu in the graphics browser and model window
- Adams 2019 can now clean CAD on import: By selecting the “Clean on Import” check box in the “File Import” window Adams will enable an automatic geometry scanner and cleaner that will scan and clean your imported geometry behind the scenes. The purpose of this function is to ensure that your geometry has fewer small imperfections and be more “watertight”, which results in better mass/property calculations based on geometry and density/material.
Adams Car Enhancements
- New Event Object and Event Set
- Adams Car 2019 introduces a new Event Object and the concept of an Event Set. Event Sets are a collection of event instances, with each instance contains enough information in order to re-create and re-run an analysis. While setting up an analysis you now have an option to create an event object under the analysis mode.
-
- This will open up an Event Browser window that lists all the event objects in the event set. Each of these event objects can be run separately by right clicking on them, or the complete set can be run by right clicking the folder that contains the event objects.
-
- An Event Browser icon has been added to the bottom right set of icons in Adams.
- Along with the new Event Sets, one can now automatically generate plots from certain Events as well as automatically generate reports. The list of standard events for which this functionality is available can be found in the Adams 2019 What’s New document.
- A new flexible body method has been added to Adams 2019. This new method is a simplified approach over the original flex body solution method. For this simplified method, the solver extracts compliance characteristics based on the flexible body's original modal definition in the MNF file. This method retains most flex compliance, but omits some dynamic effects to achieve faster solve times. The most notable limitation of this method is that it does not support flexible body contact. You can read more about this flexible body method at the MSC Software article: Rapid Design Space Exploration Made Possible.
- Adams Car components that uses property files as part of their description can now have multiple property files associated to them. Users can then toggle between the property files by means of a drop-down menu in the interface dialog.
- Bushings can now be modelled in series. One can specify two or three bushing property files in order to model local part compliance in addition to the bushing compliance itself. During an analysis the bushing files that are in series are reduced by a compliance-in-series algorithm to produce a set of stiffness and damping curves.
- Tolerances and scale factors have also been introduced to bushings. By specifying a tolerance (defined as a displacement offset) at either the I or J marker of the bushing you can investigate the sensitivity of your design to build or assembly errors.
- A new attachment has been added for Adams 2019, the Connector. It is a generic attachment whose topology can be varied in the Standard Interface and the user’s design intent will be saved in the sub-system. The connector can be used to model a joint, a bushing, both a joint and a bushing or neither (which represents no attachment).
This is by no means all that is new in Adams 2019, only a select couple of points that stood out.
For a more detailed explanation of the features you can go watch the following YouTube video or refer to 2019 Adams release Guide.