Adjusting to Today's Multi-CAD and Multi-Analysis Environments

Bob Williams
Product Manager
ALGOR, Inc.
Pittsburgh, PA

This article was published in Desktop Engineering, "Adjusting to Today's Multi-CAD, Multi-Analysis World", July 1, 2005.

Design and engineering companies increasingly need to create and share designs between multiple CAD packages. Plus, they need to study designs using any number of analysis and simulation packages. Just like the engineers we service, software providers are adjusting to this multi-CAD, multi-analysis environment by offering solutions that can best integrate a wide range of tools into customers' existing design process without requiring significant and costly changes.

Historically, design, analysis and simulation software providers have based their software solutions on proprietary file formats, which lock in users but make it difficult to work with other CAD and CAE packages. In addition, some FEA companies offer feature-limited tools embedded within specific CAD packages – requiring a separate purchase of tools for each CAD package.

Now, the trend is to utilize industry-standard plug-in architecture and open file formats to make it easy to share design data between applications. Leading software providers understand the benefit of letting engineers use whatever complementary products they need.

Today's Multi-CAD Environment

To support the analysis needs of today's engineers, it is important to offer a full-featured, single-user-interface FEA tool that works seamlessly with all of the popular CAD packages and for all analysis types. This is the path that ALGOR chose based on requests from our users who understand and experience the daily demands of working with multiple design tools. Our complete product line now supports direct CAD/CAE data exchange of parts and assemblies from Alibre Design, Autodesk Inventor, IronCAD, KeyCreator, Mechanical Desktop, Pro/ENGINEER, Rhinoceros, Solid Edge and SolidWorks. Additionally, through an industry-standard plug-in architecture, our InCAD technology provides full associativity with most of these CAD packages – allowing engineers to make iterative design changes without needing to redefine FEA loads, constraints and other data.

Users benefit from this approach because they learn and work within the same user interface regardless of their CAD package and analysis needs. This allows engineers working in multi-CAD environments to learn and use one user interface. As analysis needs expand, users can employ more advanced tools such as CFD and Mechanical Event Simulation (MES) for combined motion and stress analysis all from within the same user interface that works associatively with CAD.

Today's Multi-Analysis Environment

Engineers choose to use multiple analysis tools or vendors for many reasons including to: increase flexibility and productivity; obtain best-of-class technology or best value; and simulate a product design's performance more extensively. In order to realize these benefits, engineers must be able to exchange FEA data (model and results) with other analysis packages.

One way this is being achieved is by supporting popular FEA file formats. For instance, some FEA providers now offer support for NASTRAN input and output files. This allows companies using NASTRAN or NASTRAN-compatible products to benefit from the value-added capabilities of other analysis packages. In our case, customers can work with native NASTRAN input deck and result files directly within FEMPRO, our easy-to-use, single user interface for finite element modeling, results evaluation and presentation. This allows NASTRAN users to access our capabilities for full CAD/CAE associativity with popular CAD solid modelers; automatic, hex-dominant, hybrid solid meshing; and complementary analysis tools such as CFD and MES.

By integrating the analysis capabilities of multiple software providers, engineers can choose from a variety of FEA processors including specialized analysis tools such as acoustics, fatigue and electromagnetics, all within the same user interface. This gives engineers the flexibility to choose whatever analysis type or combination of analysis types is needed to get their products to market. Plus, it provides access to extensive results evaluation and presentation capabilities.

The use of industry-standard plug-in architecture and open file formats makes it possible to more easily move geometric and FEA data between packages. For engineers, the end result is increased flexibility and productivity – even within the multi-CAD and multi-analysis environments often involved in today's design process.