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Andrew Zistler

Maplesoft announces product partnership with SolidWorks

April 26, 2016 By Andrew Zistler Leave a Comment

asdfMaplesoft today announced that it has now become a Dassault Systèmes SolidWorks Certified Solutions Partner. This is a progression of the relationship between the two companies that has already enabled engineers to connect Maple and MapleSim, with SOLIDWORKS, a solid modeling computer-aided design (CAD) and computer-aided engineering (CAE) program.

Integration of SOLIDWORKS with Maple, the complete, rapid solution development environment, gives users a seamless way to import CAD model parameters into Maple. This gives them access to Maple’s advanced analysis tools for rigorous mathematical analysis and optimization. Users can then export updated model parameters from Maple to SOLIDWORKS.

By importing multibody CAD models from SOLIDWORKS into Maplesoft’s modeling and simulation platform, MapleSim, users can automatically capture the kinematic and kinetic properties of the model components. They can also evaluate how mechanical CAD models will behave as part of a larger, multidomain system, and apply MapleSim’s advanced analysis tools to improve and optimize designs.

Maplesoft

maplesoft.com

Filed Under: CAD Industry News, Company News, Dassault Systemes Tagged With: Maplesoft

Dassault Systemes appoints new North American managing director

April 12, 2016 By Andrew Zistler Leave a Comment

dassaultDassault Systèmes, the 3DEXPERIENCE Company, has announced that Paul DiLaura has been named Managing Director of North America. DiLaura will be responsible for managing and growing all aspects of Dassault Systèmes’ North American business operations and accelerating the adoption of the 3DEXPERIENCE platform.

Dassault Systèmes has 89,000 customers in North America and the region generates
30 percent of the company’s total revenue. North American companies in all industries are adapting to the disruption fueled by customer demand for experiences instead of simply products. Examples of this disruption include the fusion of high-tech with all other industries, the reshaping of traditional boundaries between disciplines, the arrival of additive manufacturing and next-generation robotics, and the advent of advanced materials.

“This is an exciting time for North America, with a ‘rebirth’ of manufacturing and a steady stream of breakthrough innovations and world-leading technologies. North America has the largest GDP in the world and is a critical growth market for Dassault Systèmes. Paul is a seasoned executive who has played a lead role in helping customers such as Boeing, Tesla, Faraday Future and SHoP transform their industries with the help of our 3DEXPERIENCE platform and solutions while also building out our partner ecosystem,” said Bruno Latchague, Senior Executive Vice President, Global Field Operations, Americas, Dassault Systèmes. “I look forward to working closely with Paul to help more companies leverage the 3DEXPERIENCE platform to power their business through innovation in the experience economy.”

DiLaura will be based in Santa Clara, California at Dassault Systèmes’ new West Coast headquarters. The headquarters will place Dassault Systèmes in the heart of Silicon Valley to help lead innovation with customers and partners in the area.

“North America is the birthplace of modern innovation for many of the industries we serve and I am honored to lead our great team here. Our 3,500 employees and 150 partners in North America are committed to helping our customers transform their products, content, services and business models at a rapid pace in order to compete effectively in today’s global economy,” said Paul DiLaura. “Our 3DEXPERIENCE platform and industry solutions bring together product design, simulation and information intelligence to help them collaborate and achieve their business goals. I will ensure our team and partners support this transformation and help our customers bring forth a new generation of innovation.”

DiLaura joined Dassault Systèmes in 2005 and held a variety of roles, including managing Dassault Systèmes’ relationship with Boeing, before being appointed Vice President of Sales for the Value Solutions Partner Channel in 2011. DiLaura holds bachelor’s degrees in economics and history from the University of Michigan.

Dassault Systèmes
3ds.com

Filed Under: General Blogs Tagged With: dassaultsystems

Nason launches online catalog of 3D CAD models

March 10, 2016 By Andrew Zistler Leave a Comment

nasonNason, a South Carolina-based manufacturer of hydraulic and pneumatic cylinders, switches and transducers, employs new thinking which is derived from a total market-driven approach. Nason adapts to customer requirements rather than the customer adapting to available products. This new way of thinking has been the catalyst for their interactive product configurator and 3D CAD model downloads powered by CADENAS PARTsolutions. The new configurator will make it much easier for Nason customers to visualize the wide variety of configurations available for every product, while making it quick and painless to specify and integrate those products into their designs.

Formerly, Nason customers would call or email to request specific product models for their designs. This process was labor intensive for the Nason engineering team, and often customers didn’t understand how many variations of each product were available. After receiving requests for interactive configuration capabilities and 3D previews, Nason saw an opportunity to take their business to the next level.

The goal for the new configurator and 3D CAD Models is to make Nason the easiest option for customers, while differentiating themselves from their competitors. When customers configure and download a product, the Nason sales team will often follow up and provide a free product sample for the customer to evaluate, depending on the job and application. Also, unlike many other manufacturers, Nason has no minimum order.
“Nason has a reputation as the company who makes the crazy stuff, – the special or one-off products which other manufacturers just won’t make,” says Rob Zesch, President and COO of CADENAS PARTsolutions. “Now that reputation will be evident for engineers and designers who now have access to thousands of possible configurations. Combined with Nason’s customer service and no minimum order quantity for custom products, their customers will be ecstatic.”


Nason

nasonptc.com

Filed Under: 3D CAD Package Tips Tagged With: nason

New Maple 2016 offers advanced problem-solving for math, science, engineering

March 7, 2016 By Andrew Zistler Leave a Comment

MapleGenericCore_ScreenshotMaplesoft has announced a major new release of its flagship product, Maple, the mathematical software that makes it extremely easy to analyze, explore, visualize, and solve math problems. With Maple 2016, Maplesoft offers important new abilities to educators, researchers, scientists, and engineers that allow them to solve more problems, more easily, than ever before.

Maple 2016 includes enhancements through the entire product. It solves more mathematical problems from differential equations, statistics, graph theory, and many other mathematical domains. It also provides new Clickable Math options for performing operations at the click of a button, as well as other usability enhancements throughout the product.

Some of the many new tasks that can be performed with Maple 2016 include:

  • Organizing projects and Maple applications using the new Maple Workbook, so all related documents and data files are kept together and dependencies are automatically maintained when sharing
  • Taking advantage of flexible and intuitive data frames to organize and analyze real-world data
  • Performing calculations with thermophysical properties of pure fluids, humid air and mixtures, generating customized psychrometric charts, and more
  • Using Clickable Math to perform new operations, from writing fractions as repeating decimals,  to computing cross products and dot products, or even converting Maple code to the Julia programming language
  • Searching through over 900 exact solutions to Einstein’s field equations for metrics with particular properties, and using these solution metrics and automatically derived related information in your general relatively computations
  • Helping students explore concepts such as the Sieve of Eratosthenes, tessellations, and the area of a circle, using new interactive Math Apps

In addition, Maple 2016 provides significant enhancements in the area of application development, including expanded functionality in the one-step application building tool, Explore, and new program analysis tools that analyze code to detect barriers to safe parallelization and help resolve them.

 

Maple is available in several languages including French, Simplified Chinese, and Brazilian Portuguese. A Japanese version of Maple 2016 will be available in a few weeks.

Maplesoft

maplesoft.com

Filed Under: Simulation Software Tagged With: Maplesoft

ESPRIT launches new website

February 4, 2016 By Andrew Zistler Leave a Comment

Untitled-1ESPRIT CAD/CAM SOFTWARE enters a new era with the launch of its new brand identity and corporate website, espritcam.com. The website showcases an elegant new 3D-style logo that updates yet honors the company’s original one.

Immediate and Immersive Experience
“Our new website immerses visitors in the software – straight from the homepage,” says ESPRIT’s Director of Global Marketing and Communication, Cedric Simard. “Thanks to our educational videos, machinists can instantly experience ESPRIT software in action and witness its compatibility with machine tool brands from around the globe.”

Intuitive and Responsive Design
Built with machinists and ESPRIT customers in mind, the website is available in nine languages and is responsive across multiple platforms and devices. The site features clear navigation for visitors in any manufacturing industry. Whatever their needs, machinists can access relevant information based on their industry, their machine tool, or the type of machining operation they want to perform.

Educational Content
The new website showcases ESPRIT’s capabilities, especially in 5-axis, multitasking, wire EDM, and Swiss-style machining. In addition, product pages highlight ESPRIT’s compatibility with machine tool builders, world-class customer support and factory-certified post processors.

ESPRIT
espritcam.com

Filed Under: CAD Industry News Tagged With: esprit

Cloud-native CAD will disrupt the PLM platform paradigm

January 13, 2016 By Andrew Zistler Leave a Comment

By Bruce Jenkins, President, Ora Research

An illuminating blog post by Onshape engineering team member Ilya Baran reveals some fundamentals of how the new cloud-native CAD system works: “We are careful to distinguish several types of data: the User Interface (UI) state – e.g., selection, camera view, current tab; the Part Studio definition – e.g., feature list, part names and colors, import data; [and] Regeneration results – the “b-rep” (bodies, faces, edges, etc.), triangles for display, regen errors.”

How do these data types differ? “The UI state generally doesn’t persist (except for things like named views),” Baran writes. “The regeneration results are cached, but they can always be rebuilt from the definition. The Part Studio definition is what we store in the database and that is where collaborative editing happens.”

Then Baran explains something that begins to suggest why we believe Onshape is not only a breakthrough in CAD, but also poised to disrupt the established paradigm for PLM platforms. “For a given Part Studio, at each point in time, the definition is stored as an eternal, immutable object that we internally call a microversion,” he writes. “Whenever the user changes the Part Studio definition (e.g., edits an extrude length, renames a part, or drags a sketch), we do not change an existing microversion, but create a new one to represent this new definition. The new microversion stores a reference to the previous (parent) microversion and the actual definition change. In this way, we store the entire evolution of the Document: this is accessible to the user as the Document history, allowing the user to reliably view and restore any prior state of an Onshape Document.”

Onshape Follow Mode. Source: Onshape
Onshape Follow Mode. Source: Onshape

Next Baran reveals how Onshape is fundamentally different from older-generation engineering software. “Basing Onshape on immutable microversions also makes for a great foundation for other collaboration tools: those we already have, such as the Follow Mode or the Compare tool, as well as those we are developing for the future,” he says. “It also has benefits beyond just collaboration abilities: because old microversions are never modified, data integrity is better preserved, and having a history of changes allows us to debug exactly how a Document came to be when a user has a problem or when we detect a problem through our logs.”

New cloud-native database architecture changes everything

What makes all this possible and practical? Much of the answer lies in Onshape’s being built on MongoDB, one of the new “NoSQL” databases widely used in cloud-native applications, instead of any of the relational database management systems (RDBMS) used in most engineering applications until now. “Relational databases were not designed to cope with the scale and agility challenges that face modern applications,” MongoDB says, “nor were they built to take advantage of the commodity storage and processing power available today.” MongoDB functions as back-end software for Craigslist, eBay, Foursquare, LinkedIn and many other of today’s massively deployed cloud-based services.

Besides being fast, scalable and designed to exploit cloud computing resources, NoSQL databases have a capability called “schema-on-read.” This allows data to be captured, stored and subsequently acted on with almost limitless freedom, without the application developer having to create a schema for the data in advance. Having to create such a schema as the first step in creating a database, a requirement of traditional RDBMS technology, is known as “schema-on-write.”

Joe Pasqua with MarkLogic, another NoSQL database provider, explains the benefits of schema-on-read: “For decades now the database world has been oriented towards the schema-on-write approach. First you define your schema, then you write your data, then you read your data and it comes back in the schema you defined up-front. This approach is so deeply ingrained in our thinking that many people would ask, ‘How else would you do it?’ The answer is schema-on-read. Schema-on-read follows a different sequence – just load the data as-is and apply your own lens to the data when you read it back out.”

What’s the advantage? “More and more these days, data is a shared asset among groups of people with differing roles and differing interests – who want to get different insights from that data,” Pasqua explains. “With schema-on-write, you have to think about all of these constituencies in advance and define a schema that has something for everyone, but isn’t a perfect fit for anyone. When you are talking about huge volumes of data, it just isn’t practical. With schema-on-read you can present data in a schema that is adapted best to the queries being issued. You’re not stuck with a one-size-fits-all schema.”

But that’s not all. “One of the places where projects often go off the rails is when multiple datasets are being consolidated,” Pasqua continues. “With schema-on-write, you have to do an extensive data modeling job and develop an über-schema that covers all of the datasets that you care about. Then you have to think about whether your schema will handle the new datasets that you’ll inevitably want to add later. If you’re lucky enough to get through that process, Murphy will strike again and you’ll be asked to add, change or drop a column (or two or three). With schema-on-read, this upfront modeling exercise disappears.”

“In time, Onshape will be the system of record for all types of data & meta-data”

Those underlying capabilities of Onshape’s database architecture – together with its ability to import, operate on, and archive data from other engineering applications – begin to suggest the true scope and scale of the company’s long-term ambitions and vision. Indeed, it has made no secret of this. Around the time of Onshape’s public unveiling last year, a user posted in its online discussion forum: “Is Onshape intending to develop PLM eventually, or are they going to go the route of partners to provide that? I ask because Onshape is a database system with the correct platform to seemingly handle this functionality.”

In reply, Steve Hess from Onshape’s UX/PD team posted: “As you know Onshape was built with data management in mind. The data management features of Onshape are at the core of the product and will become more exposed as Onshape matures. In time, Onshape will be the system of record for all types of data & meta-data…The data stored in Onshape will be visible and accessible to your other enterprise systems.” (Our emphasis.)

Already, the ways in which Onshape lets multiple users work simultaneously on the same design serve to eliminate many problems that established PDM and PLM providers have spent years “solving” — and at the same time perpetuating, because of the database architectures their systems were built on. As Onshape founder and chairman Jon Hirschtick told us, “For starters we eliminate 50-60% of all the functions of traditional PDM – they simply have no role (copying files, managing directory structures, etc.) in our world.”

Far from being a throwaway line, we think Hirschtick’s phrase “for starters” is in dead earnest. To date, Onshape’s best-understood benefits are how it removes many of the headaches and costs of locally installed software, and of CAD collaboration and data management. But we believe its larger goal is to evolve a next-generation product development platform that “in time,” as Hess declared, “will be the system of record for all types of data and meta-data.”

Onshape’s ability to do this is grounded in two key benefits of schema-on-read. First, it “gives you massive flexibility over how the data can be consumed,” explains Tom Deutsch, Solution CTO with IBM, and second, “your raw/atomic data can be stored for reference and consumption years into the future.” These position Onshape to extend its radical simplification of CAD collaboration and data management to more and more areas of PLM where users have had enough of complexity and expense, and are ready for something new.

Ora Research

oraresearch.com

Filed Under: CAD Industry News Tagged With: oraresearch

MSC Software announces SimManager 2015

December 22, 2015 By Andrew Zistler Leave a Comment

mscMSC Software Corporation has announced the new release of SimManager 2015. SimManager 2015 brings process enhancements and improved ease of use to MSC Software’s Simulation Process and Data Management solution with an intuitive user interface and easy deployability. SimManager 2015 is the most comprehensive version released by MSC Software, delivering revolutionary process automation and enhanced data collaboration, all with configuration, not customization.

This release provides full Adams/Car Portal Data Management integration into SimManager, providing a platform for storing, retrieving and managing vehicle dynamics models enabling improved cooperation among design teams. Support includes ability to work on local models, retrieval and publishing of these models from/to SimManager and sharing models with a global team. The Adams/Car Plug-In for Adams/View provides support for publishing and retrieving Adams/Car models from the GUI, improving ease of use and productivity.

New Advanced File Selector allows drag & drop file selection, new file browsers and integrated progress bar supporting large files over 2GB.New User Groups provide a new Dynamic Group capability for use in projects and notification. Collaborative sharing of objects provides the ability to share/unshare objects outside of projects eliminating the duplicate effort in object creation.

SimManager 2015 includes support for the newly introduced token based system, namely, MSC One licensing. The enhancements in license handling for both MSC One and traditional licensing improves access to both SimManager and other solutions delivered by MSC Software in a cost-effective manner.

MSC Software
mscsoftware.com

Filed Under: CAD Industry News Tagged With: mscsoftware

Mentor Graphics announces release of FloEFD computational fluid dynamics product

December 17, 2015 By Andrew Zistler Leave a Comment

Mentor Graphics New FloEFD Mesh VisualMentor Graphics Corporation (NASDAQ: MENT) today announced the latest release of its leading general purpose, front-loading computational fluid dynamics (CFD) FloEFD solution offering greater accuracy and user productivity. Updated features in this new version include improved mesh handling, an enhanced transient solver, a robust EDA interface, and an interface to Abaqus Finite Element Analysis (FEA) software for stress analysis. Engineers and specialists in the automotive, aerospace and electronics markets will directly benefit from the improved accuracy and productivity.

The latest version of the FloEFD product offers new capabilities for minimizing user time and effort spent on meshing. The FloEFD tool can automatically fill gaps of specified size to quickly make the model watertight, thereby eliminating the time and necessity to adjust the original geometry. The new equidistant refinement capability lets users build multilevel uniform meshes around the body or surface of the model with just one click. And the mesh preview visualization tool helps users achieve the desired mesh with ease and speed.

The new FloEFD product release also features the following:

• A highly improved transient solver allows for faster solution of transient applications as well as higher accuracy for pressure-dominated tasks such as calculating filling/evacuating of a tank or water hammer thereby increasing range of realistic situations that can be modeled.

• A powerful electronic design automation (EDA) interface can help users avoid creating PCBs manually. Users can now import geometric EDA data including copper traces and vias. The interface supports the Mentor Graphics Xpedition® (CC or CCE), IDF and OCB++ PCB design data formats.

• The refractive index depending on wavelength and temperature offers higher accuracy of light and radiation analysis in case materials with complex spectral characteristics are utilized e.g. in automotive lighting industry.

• The ability to visualize rays used for precise radiation modelling allows the user to better understand the impact of the sources on the system, thus helping to find the reason of overheating and suggest the solution faster.

• An engineering task usually requires views from different angles. To support multi-disciplinary analysis, the FloEFD tool can now export pressure and thermal loads to Abaqus for further stress analysis.

• The Calculation Manager displays all projects currently running and those in the queue, thus allowing users to get a better idea as to where their projects stand and to easily control all calculations running at the moment.

The FloEFD product is available as a stand-alone and/or a CAD-embedded tool supporting popular MCAD platforms including Creo, CATIA V5, and Siemens NX.

Mentor Graphics
mentor.com

Filed Under: CAD Industry News, CFD, Simulation Software Tagged With: mentorgraphics

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