To help engineers reduce development time, MacNeal-Schwendler Corp. has been improving the interoperability of its CAE software with CAD. The company's MSC/PATRAN Version 8 has many new enhancements that allow it to work more effectively with CAD models. New features make it possible for users to import CAD geometry more easily than before and quickly create high-quality analysis models.
When creating complex surface geometry, CAD systems often produce a large number of surfaces with gaps, overlaps, and other small features that must be cleaned up before an analysis model can be developed. MSC/PATRAN's rapid surface meshing can eliminate this step, which can take weeks to perform otherwise.
"The rapid surface mesher in Version 8 greatly improves throughput and reduces body modeling and meshing cycle times," explained Jim Archer, MSC's Senior Vice President, Worldwide Development. "An engineer can rapidly mesh a CAD surface model with many discontinuous complex surfaces. This valuable new tool helps bring a new product to market much more rapidly, and at a reduced cost."
With Version 8, the additional support is given for Unigraphics (UG) features and parameters that will make it much easier to create analysis models for updated or changed UG parts and assemblies. As a result of this new level of integration between UG and Version 8, structural analysts can directly access UG models containing feature information. MSC/PATRAN automatically updates the CAE model for any change made to the UG geometry.
Version 8 can also access CATIA geometry without translations using its Direct CATIA function. The primary concern of engineers using MSC/PATRAN was performing analysis on CATIA geometry while avoiding the requirement of having someone on hand who was familiar with its user interface to export an intermediate file for subsequent import into MSC/PATRAN. Direct CATIA eliminates this potential bottleneck in the analysis process by permitting access to the CATIA model directly from MSC/PATRAN. The CATIA layer filtering is now supported by Version 8 so that only relevant analysis geometry is accessed.
The software also has the ability to directly access ACIS geometry, enabling users to create analysis models quickly from geometry created for CoCreate, AutoCAD, and other ACIS-based geometry systems. It also provides a number of other enhancements and features that save users time, ranging from the process of installation to the interfacing with many commercial analysis codes, especially MSC/NASTRAN.
