ALGOR V19: Pushing the Boundaries of
FEA
By Bob Turney, P.E.
Project Engineer
TIW Corporation
Houston, TX
This article was published in Machine Design,
How two operating systems boost FEA productivity, March 23, 2006.
As a Project Engineer for TIW Corporation, an oilfield services company
that designs and manufactures down-hole equipment for oil companies
worldwide, I am involved with all of our projects that require the use
of finite element analysis (FEA) software. I regularly use FEA to assist
our department in the design of liner hangers, packers, tie-back
receptacles, whipstocks and a variety of special-purpose equipment for
our customers’ particular needs. These projects often require the
modeling and testing of new or altered designs in order to satisfy our
reliability, safety and efficiency requirements.
ALGOR is the FEA software of choice at TIW. The ability to simulate the
operation of our designs using ALGOR Mechanical Event Simulation (MES)
can save TIW the time and cost of buying material, machining parts,
assembling the product and rigging the test equipment. Instead, when a
new idea is conceived, we can easily model the design with changes and
decide whether it helps or hinders performance, before making any parts.
In some cases, the dollars savings can be as high as $25,000 per
product.
Previously, ALGOR supported 32-bit Windows for all analysis types and
64-bit Windows for linear static stress analysis. The company’s V19
release now allows users to apply the power and speed of 64-bit Windows
and 32- and 64-bit Red Hat Linux operating systems to all ALGOR analysis
types. I was excited with the prospect of ALGOR’s new capability to run
on 64-bit Linux computers since our analyses are often quite
time-consuming and computer-intensive.
I
decided to model a state-of-the-art liner hanger system as a 2-D
axisymmetric MES using ALGOR V19. I loaded V19 on a new COMPAQ Presario,
set up as a dual-boot system running the Linux (64-bit) and Windows XP
(32-bit) operating systems. While in Windows, I created one of three
parts of the model as a wireframe in AutoCAD and opened it in ALGOR
FEMPRO. I then modeled the remaining two parts before switching to
Linux, where I opened the complete model in ALGOR.
I
defined the analysis type as MES with nonlinear materials and started
the analysis. After the computation in Linux, I returned to FEMPRO in
Windows to examine the graphic and tabular results.
I
was happy to see ALGOR V19 running on Linux and allowing results to be
viewed in Windows. Such design and analysis compatibility across
operating systems means that I can perform more complex analyses on the
64-bit operating system and then send the results to Windows users who
can view them without doing any conversion of files. Being able to run
ALGOR on Linux (and Unix in V19.1) promises to reduce computation times
significantly, especially with the upcoming distributed-processing
support. And, with ALGOR’s new remote analysis capabilities, I can model
on one computer and have the analysis run remotely on another computer.
That means I can model on a Windows machine and then directly run the
analysis on a remote Linux machine. Best of all, these extremely
beneficial features are available at no additional cost.
In short, V19 will greatly increase my productivity, particularly for
computationally intensive analyses such as nonlinear MES and
multiphysics. I look forward to using V19 for numerous projects and
recommend it for engineers who need the flexible operating system
support now offered by ALGOR.
Bob Turney, P.E., served in the Army from 1972
to 1974 and received his BSME at the University of Houston in 1978. He
earned certification as a P.E. in 1986 and worked at Texas Instruments,
Dresser-Atlas, CAMCO and Halliburton Energy Services before joining TIW
Corporation in 1997.
Founded in 1917, TIW Corporation offers the oil industry a comprehensive
product line including liner equipment, liner-hanger packers, liner
packers, packer-bore receptacle systems, packer systems, retrievable
packer systems, seal-bore packer systems, horizontal completion
technology, window-cutting products, gravel-pack packers, sand-control
service and safety valves. |
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