SIMTEQ Newsletter August 2022

Introduction

events

Product of the month

The art of engineering

New releases

Training

What a month! The Users’ Conference was a big hit with everyone who attended and we didn’t even have a break since. Be sure to keep an eye out for our LinkedIn posts where we are sharing some of the highlights.

We are also presenting a brand-new course next week on special request by the CSIR and the Paramount Group, “Additive Manufacturing and Generative Design” to establish design capabilities in the country for Additive Manufacturing. The course covers the spectrum of structure mechanics, all the way through to the manufacturability of generative designs.

The week there after, we will be exhibiting at Electra Mining Africa where Dr. Carsten Schmitt will join us from Hexagon to establish Romax in the country as a design and analysis tool for gearbox design and development.

If you missed the cool experiments showcased by Clinton, at the Users’ Conference, be sure to visit us at Electra Mining.

And just to make sure that we don’t get used to any sleep thereafter, we will also be exhibiting at the AAD expo. More information below.

The product of the month is Adams, where we highlight its key capabilities like non-linear flexible bodies, control system integration, durability, the machinery toolkits and Adams Car. If there is one tool you shouldn’t be without to determine accurate mechanical loads for your structural analyses, its Adams.

Many new product releases made it to the download centre as well and we highlight the best new features for each. Have a look, there are many excellent capabilities added to each.

In the art of engineering this month, we get an eerie feel for what the future holds for the construction (and art in this case) industry. Like a spider spinning a web, these bots are spinning fiberglass structures. Imagine uploading a design at night and seeing a building sized structure in the morning (without any framework)! We surely live in the future.

Don’t forget about all the training and webinar opportunities either. Nothing beats the competition like knowledge. Keep sharpening your saw!

Regards

Managing Director

Upcoming Events

You had to be there

SIMTEQ ENGINEERING USERS' CONFERENCE 2022

The SIMTEQ Users Conference again proved itself this year as the best platform to present engineering challenges and CAE solutions.

The SIMTEQ Users’ Conference came to an end with too many compliments from the attendees to mention them all. The spectrum of presentations and quality of the work presented was of an exceptional standard, with Hubert van der Merwe of eNtsa walking away with the Simteq Engineering Award of Excellence 2022, for his best presentation on “Using Marc to automate and optimize Small Punch Testing”. With their small punch testing procedure, they are able to determine the exact stress-strain curve for any metal from a small sample and determine the FEA material model parameters that will produce the same result, making it possible to conduct extremely accurate structural analyses.

Many of the presentations of the day are available for sharing and will be made available upon request. Feel free to contact anyone in the SIMTEQ team to request a specific presentation.

The format and layout of the event was again so well received that we decided that, instead of growing the conference to even more attendees in the future and hosting them in a large auditorium, we will cap the number of attendees for next year and keep the round table setup. It promoted networking and enabled group conversations that would otherwise not be possible, which we feel have much more value than a massive event where you hardly have an opportunity to talk to anyone.

Everyone attending not only enjoyed the day, but also said that they found value in the presentations and that it proved again to be the networking event of the year.

We are looking forward to seeing you next year and make sure to keep an eye out for the invitation to register for next year.

Adams

Adams is the complete multibody dynamics analysis package. But what is multibody dynamics you may ask? Multibody dynamics refers to a system of bodies connected to each other with joints and its motion is defined by the forces and/or motions applied to it. However, it is more than that, you can also do the reverse. With a set of bodies that are connected via joints, you can reverse engineer the problem and determine the forces that are applied to those joints for a specified force or motion.

This is in essence what Adams is, a simulation package that allows you to take your mechanism assembly, be it a simple pendulum, a suspension of a car, a hydraulicly controlled boom of an excavator or even the motion of your arm, if it can be represented by a series of bodies connected to each other with joints Adams can help you.

Flexible Bodies in Adams

Adams has for a while now been about more than a couple of rigid bodies connected with a hinge.

With Adams Flex and Adams Viewflex, you can easily add linear flexible bodies to your mechanical system, or even convert existing bodies from rigid to flexible. Adams Flex allows you to import a finite element model from most of the popular FEA packages currently available. Making it as simple as possible to take your finite element part and see how its stiffness will influence the response of your multi-body dynamics system.

Adams Viewflex allows you, the user to transform a rigid part in your Adams View model into a flexible one without ever leaving the Adams View interface. Using MSC Nastran in the background converting a rigid body to a flexible one has never been simpler.

The more astute reader would have noticed the “linear flexible bodies” disclaimer above. It used to be the case that Adams could only do rigid bodies, then linear flexible bodies were made available, but nowadays you aren’t even limited to linear flexible bodies. With the advent of FE Part, Adams MaxFlex and Adams-Marc co-simulation non-linear flexible bodies are within your reach.

FE Part is an Adams native modelling object that allows you to model beam structures that is accurate for very large deformations (geometric non-linearity). Adams MaxFlex takes this a step further with geometric, material and boundary condition non-linearity. Adams MaxFlex makes use of non-linear FEA technology embedded into Adams, so as with Adams ViewFlex, no additional software is required to solve your flexible body model.

Control Systems in Adams

Almost all advanced mechanical systems make use of some sort of control system. But how do you evaluate such a control system and the response of your mechanical system to that control system? With Adams Controls and Adams Mechatronics, you can connect your Adams model to your control system generated in EASY5 or MATLAB/Simulink.

Once your control system is connected you can solve your analysis in Adams and view the response of your system or plot graphs that track forces or motions you are interested in.

Durability in Adams

Durability testing is a field that is critical for modern designs. However, Adams Durability with its integration with MSC Fatigue allows you to assess the stress, strain, or the life of the components of your mechanical system. Adams Durability will allow you to use physical test data and loads captured during tests to correlate your analysis model. You will also be able to export your loads to your FEA package for detailed stress analyses.

Machinery in Adams

Adams Machinery is an extensive simulation suite within Adams that allows you to model a wide variety of mechanical drive systems. With access to gears, belts, chains, cables, cams, bearings and electric motors the potential to create your mechanical system as accurately as possible has never been simpler.
Each one of the above-mentioned modules comes with its own user interface to assist you in the setup of the components, saving you time and removing uncertainty.

Adams Car

Adams Car with its associated vertical products like Adams Tire, Adams Driveline and Adams Chassis to name a few, allows you to build and test prototypes of complete vehicles or vehicle sub-systems. With pre-setup suspension and full vehicle analyses, as well as pre-defined common outputs, seeing the response of your vehicle or component because of a specific event has never been easier.

A multi-agent, fibre composite digital manufacturing system

With a description like that, you won’t be mistaken for thinking of a manufacturing setting, or at the very least a research setting. However, with several robots creeping slowly towards the heavens as they wind fibreglass filaments around themselves in a manner reminiscent of a caterpillar spinning its cocoon, one can see why the team from MIT decided to turn it into an art installation.

The video (posted on LinkedIn) from Interesting Engineering gives a voice-over to the original video posted by MIT Media Lab. For a more detailed description of the project, you can check out the MIT Media Lab post (https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/fiberbots/overview/) about the project that ran from January 2016 to May 2019.

View the video

View the post

Adams Modeler 2022.2

Adams Modeler 2022.2 is now available at the Software Download Center.

Click here to learn about What’s New in Adams Modeler 2022.2.

Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence announces the launch of Adams Modeler 2022.2. This new release features several extensions to support various modeling objects within Adams Modeler.

FEA STRESS RECOVERY

Stress recovery is now supported on rigid parts

DESIGN VARIABLES

Support for Adams View Design Variable modification in Modeler

EXPLODED VIEW

Improvements for clearer display of motion entities and editing in the exploded view

Enhanced Model View Synchronization

The location, zoom level and orientation are maintained when context switching between the two interface options

CAEfatigue 2022.2

CAEfatigue 2022.2 is now available at the Software Download Center.

Click here to learn about What’s New in CAEfatigue 2022.2.

Some main highlights of this release include:

Robust Design for Stochastic Assessment of Input Variables – Significantly Improved

- This new technology is now fully released in this latest version with significantly enhanced capabilities including more MSC Nastran™ analyses cover by the tool and more input / output options available. Robust Design allows a user to re-run MSC Nastran™ consecutively while modifying input variables for each run, which results in a correlation map of input variables to outputs, and what effect each of the inputs has on output values. This allows better design decisions to be made by seeing a holistic view of how the model reacts under all inputs, instead of just seeing the results from a single MSC Nastran™ analysis using nominal values for all variables.

Time Domain 3D (Solid) Element Seam Weld Analysis with Fringe Plotter Seam Weld Pick Tool

- Users can now easily select seam welds from within the Fringe Plotter and use those elements within a 3D solid element Time Domain seam weld analysis.

Time Domain BS7608 3D (Solid) Element Weld Analysis with Fringe Plotter Weld Pick Tool

- Users can now easily select welds from within the Fringe Plotter and use those elements within a BS7608 Time Domain weld analysis. The User can select multiple Weld Classes to assign to the welds including C, B1, B2, C, C1, C2, D, E, F, F1, F3, G, W1, W2, W3, and T.

Material Mapping to Automatically Link MSC Nastran™ MAT IDs to XML Database Material

- Users can now automatically assign XML materials to all elements (or a set of elements) with a correctly associated MSC Nastran™ MAT ID. The User simply provides a crossover file that links the MAT ID to the correct XML material and the software will make the connections automatically.

Improved Fringe Plotter Graphics and Additional Features Enhancements.

- Users will now see a faster display of graphics in the Fringe Plotter and the legend has been modified to give a better color range. Along with these improvements, CAEfatigue has also enhanced some features including the ability to now get nodal averaged results from a Time Domain analyses, the ability to get PSD plots from a Random analysis, and the ability to select Multiaxial Assessment and Factor of Safety (FOS) within the same run.

FormingSuite 2022

FormingSuite 2022 is now available at the Software Download Center.

Click here to learn about What’s New in FormingSuite 2022.

Here's what might be of interest to you in this release:

Smart Regeneration for Process Planner

- What is it?

- - Regeneration of 2D and 3D processes has been made smarter

- What's in it for you?

- - More control over if and when your 2D and 3D processes are regenerated after changing input parameters and features

Die Materials by Region

- What is it?

- - The ability to set up die materials by region

- What's in it for you?

- - Allows you to specify different die material costs in different regions and displays costs within the supplier settings
  - Provides better basis for comparison between suppliers
  - Now allows mixing of castings and steel components

Double attaching across flanges

- What is it?

- - The ability to suppress flanges for double attaching and then unfold them onto the bridging geometry

- What's in it for you?

- - Better representation of double attached geometry
  - Verification that flanges will fit onto bridge surface
  - Correct cost estimates including flanges

Major Enhancements to Incremental Simulation

- What is it?

- - Additional features and improvements to both speed and accuracy.

- What's in it for you?

- - Full support for in-process trimming including auto-trim iterative solution
  - Substantial solver speed-up through better parallelization and additional optimization
  - Automated initial mesh refinement to better capture intricate surface details
  - Improved analytical drawbead solutions

Data export for chained simulations

- What is it?

- - New and enhanced results export formats for consideration of manufacturing effects in assembly, durability, crash, NVH simulations

- What's in it for you?

- - Added stress tensors, thickness and strain components to ARC file export format (both inverse and incremental solutions)
  - Added stress tensors to dyna .k export format

Additional Materials

- What is it?

- - More materials have been added to the default materials database

- What's in it for you?

- - Additional commonly used materials added to the default database

User Profiles

- What is it?

- - The Ability to save, export and import user profile settings

- What's in it for you?

- - A better way to share settings with other users and standardize across organizations
  - Ensures a smooth upgrade process

Configurable HTML Reports

- What is it?

- - HTML reports can now be configured to show only the content you are interested in

- What's in it for you?

- - The ability to enable or disable a variety of different sections within the HTML report

Note: the installation package for FormingSuite 2022 no longer includes the LS-Dyna solver or licensing executables. If you are still using LS-Dyna for incremental simulations, you will have to copy these files into the respective folders manually.

MSC Apex Generative Design 2022.2

MSC Apex Generative Design 2022.2 is now available at the Software Download Center.

Click here to learn about What’s New in MSC Apex Generative Design 2022.2.

Here are the key highlights

Automatic preparation of FE-Verification with MSC Apex: Transfer of the Design Candidate’s boundary conditions and material information

The Transfer Design Candidate to Pre Processing button now includes even more functionality than the simple transfer of the geometry to the Pre Processing. There are two feasible workflows:

Nurbs Geometry: The Smooth Geometry is transferred to the Pre Processing and the Facet to Nurbs Tool is automatically executed with the chosen Density of the Nurbs Patches. When the transformation is completed, the Nurbs Geometry is intersected with the Design Space to receive the Nominal Geometry. Next, the new functionality is executed and the Loads & Boundary Conditions as well as the Material information are mapped to the Nominal Nurbs Geometry.
Facet Geometry: The Smooth Geometry is transferred to the Pre Processing and is intersected with the Design Space to receive the Nominal Geometry. Next, the new functionality is executed and the Loads & Boundary Conditions as well as the Material information are mapped to the Nominal Faceted Geometry.

Open Generative Design project in Apex to verify results
The MSC Apex Generative Design database can be directly opened in MSC Apex. A copy of the database for Apex is created and can be worked in. To run a linear static analysis the only workflow step necessary is to mesh the geometry and create the desired Scenario.
If other Loads and Boundary Conditions are intended for the verification, these can be added to the model and the corresponding analysis can be run.

Implementation of SuperVoxel Phase 1
The optimisation algorithm is now enhanced by SuperVoxel. This change will happen in different phases and introduced in the next few releases. In phase 1, a significant performance enhancement is realised as well as a file size reduction during the optimisation. This enables users to calculate with higher complexity values even on GPUs with limited memory.

Odyssee 2022.2

ODYSSEE A-Eye 2022.2 is now available at the Software Download Center.

Click here to learn about What’s New in ODYSSEE A-Eye 2022.2.

New plot viewer in the Learning and Prediction tab UX
Load csv of tags or values available in the Learning and Prediction tab
Data processing using python is now possible
Canny filter script added to detect edges in an image

ODYSSEE CAE 2022.2 is now available at the Software Download Center.

Click here to learn about What’s New in ODYSSEE CAE 2022.2.

Some main highlights of this release include:

FMU export for model exchange
Export ROM FMU for parameterized superelements for Nastran and Marc
Reliability interval for Kriging interpolation
Display the displacement entity for h5

ODYSSEE Solver 2022.2 is now available at the Software Download Center.

Click here to learn about What’s New in ODYSSEE Solver 2022.2.

Some main highlights of this release include:

GPnewpoint method to add samples automatically to the database
Multiple Layer Perceptron (MLP) algorithm, new predictive algorithm
Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) algorithm, new forecasting algorithm

Simufact Forming 2022

Simufact Forming 2022 is now available at the Software Download Center.

Look forward to the 5 Top New Features in Simufact Forming 2022:

New parallelization technique for Finite-Volume simulations – Up to 4x faster FV Simulation.
Enormous improvement in predicting the occurrence and propagation of fractures – Simulate damage correctly and with high accuracy of the results.
Improvements to increase the robustness of cutting simulations – No more annoying simulation aborts during cutting processes.
Increased performance through improved meshing technology – Fewer elements, faster simulations.
Improved UI & UX – Modernized GUI to unify with other Simufact products for better UX and usability.

Click here to learn about What’s New in Simufact Forming 2022.