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Leslie Langnau

Volume Graphics version 3.4 CT-Software includes Scan-to-CAD reverse engineering capabilities

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Digital analysis and physical testing are increasingly integrated with the pursuit of optimized product design and development across a wide swath of industries. With the release of its VGSTUDIO MAX version 3.4 software, Volume Graphics has added and augmented important functions that help designers and manufacturers capture and interrogate product data to improve final quality.

When there’s no 3D CAD model of an object available, VGSTUDIO MAX 3.4’s Reverse Engineering Module provides a suite of capabilities in one automated package. The Module can generate surfaces from a CT scan, or any voxel model converted from a closed mesh/point cloud scan, using an auto-surface function that is fast and accurate. This new function allows manually generated design models to be available digitally—without the need for a CAD designer or reverse-engineering specialist.

The new Reverse Engineering Module in VGSTUDIO MAX 3.4 makes it easy to convert CT scans into CAD models that can be used in any CAD system without the need for a CAD designer or reverse engineering specialist.

An important benefit is the ability to generate and archive 3D CAD models of legacy parts, as well as update those models in which the actual part or tool deviates from the master CAD model. This automates the creation of digital twins of individual parts and allows for validation of the model-to-part relationship. The recreated or newly validated CAD model can be exported as a STEP file to any CAD system. The software also enables CAM systems to mill on CAD instead of meshes.

Compare components or samples over time to detect damage and calculate strains with DVC
Measuring strain and quantifying and visualizing defects in material samples due to external loads are key tasks for materials scientists. The new Digital Volume Correlation (DVC) Module in VGSTUDIO MAX 3.4 helps users to quantify displacements and strains simply and intuitively between multiple states over time. It enables a precise insight into the material at hand, e.g., to detect cracks and to measure the local strain.

Displacement between two datasets acquired during an in-situ test on a fiber-reinforced polymer, as visualized in VGSTUDIO MAX 3.4 software. Data provided by the Institute of Applied Materials at Karlsruhe Institute for Technology (KIT) in Germany.

This is particularly useful for gaining a deeper understanding of foams, fiber composite materials, or additively manufactured (AM, aka 3D-printed) porous samples or components. Voxel-based, three-dimensional volumes are automatically correlated by the software, allowing for before-and-after comparisons of in-situ experiments. Results are visualized in extreme detail, making it easy to pinpoint exactly where defects or damage have occurred.

The user can quantify and visualize problems like cracks and pores, which can be missed by the naked eye, by comparing datasets at different states over time with the initial undamaged data. Results are visualized via color overlay, vector fields or strain lines. The equivalent strain or single components of the strain tensor can be shown as a color overlay and mapped directly on a volume mesh to validate the results of FEA simulations.

VGSTUDIO MAX also allows for mapping microstructure information such as fiber orientation, fiber-volume content, or matrix porosity on the same mesh that is used for the FEA. This allows the user to consider all significant microstructure information within a mechanical model and validate it by comparing FEA and DVC results.

VGSTUDIO MAX 3.4 provides stunning visualizations that show a spatial impression of the displacement field.

DVC is not only helpful in the laboratory—it is also a powerful tool to detect internal damage for maintenance of composite materials, like those in a helicopter blade, by comparing a scan acquired after manufacturing with another scan of the same part after several years of use.

Other enhancements to version 3.4
In addition to the new reverse engineering and volume comparison enhancements, VGSTUDIO MAX 3.4 also includes:

–New visualization options for deviations of geometric tolerances to answer questions such as: Where exactly are the highest deviations located? How are the deviations distributed on a surface? Which areas of the surface were actually evaluated?
–Subvoxel-accurate defect detection with VGEasyPore to differentiate between gas pores and shrinkage cavities.
–Stress tensor export in a .csv file of stress fields calculated using the VGSTUDIO MAX Structural –Mechanics Simulation Module, e.g., for fatigue analysis.
–New, more intuitive Tool Dock that reduces mouse travel needed to navigate.
–Support of 4K displays for a crisper, sharper, and scalable graphical user interface.

Volume Graphics software provides a visual, comprehensive, and easily understandable representation of a part’s geometrical deviations. Depending on the toleranced element, certain methods for visualizing the actual deviations can be activated, e.g., a colored and scaled deviation vector for position tolerances (above), while simultaneously showing entire patterns of position tolerances.

Many of the enhanced capabilities released in this latest version of Volume Graphics’ software have been developed with direct input from customers. The result is a high-performance, automated package of CT-scan data analysis and visualization tools that supports design and development engineers, and manufacturers, in producing the highest-quality, most-competitive products possible.

Volume Graphics
www.volumegraphics.com

Ex-MSC VP Doug Neill founds Computational Engineering Software for integrated computational materials engineering

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Bruce Jenkins | Ora Research

Doug Neill, a 22-year MSC Software veteran whose career includes 11 years as VP of the company’s R&D group, has founded a new company providing software and services for ICME—integrated computational materials engineering. Computational Engineering Software, LLC’s mission is to help engineering and manufacturing organizations “optimize your composite design through advanced simulation.”

CES details the heretofore unsolved problems it is attacking: “Current composite design is nearly 100% empirical. In aerospace, the building-block process requires thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of tests of increasing complexity, from simple laminate coupons to structural elements, to details to components to full-scale test, to develop the design space. Design is constricted by what laminates have been tested. Exploring new design concepts or materials isn’t feasible because of the testing required.”

The company cites typical complaints from users of traditional tools and methods:

  • “We can’t explore new design concepts. We have no reliable way to quickly evaluate them without testing, and there’s no time for that.”
  • “We’ve done 30,000 coupon tests and we still don’t know why our matrix is failing.”
  • “For our chopped-fiber parts, we have to proof-test every design change, and one in every eight parts in production. Why can’t we have an analysis method that will give us a reliable margin of safety, like we do for metals?”

What CES proposes is to “allow you to break out of the restrictive building-block process by using analysis to examine the constituent materials (i.e., fiber and matrix) independently, and find where the onset of failure in the material occurs—hence the name Onset Analysis. When does my matrix start to become critical? When does my fiber become critical? When (and where) is a delamination likely to start? When will the fiber overcome shear-lag and start to unload? Those are the critical questions in design that Onset Analysis can answer, for any layup, any geometry, without a mountain of test data.

“Onset Analysis also enables you to look at your design under extreme environments, like elevated temperatures, moisture, cold dry, or even the extreme cold of space applications.”

How this differs from older composite simulation methods

CES says that previous failure criteria such as Hashin, Tsai-Hill, Tsai-Wu and others “assume that a ply is a homogeneous material, and ignore the fact that there are fibers in a matrix and out-of-plane loads. They’re engineering approximations—curve fits of specific ply failure tests that create a failure envelope.”

By contrast, the company describes Onset Analysis as “actually a throwback to a classical way of doing things. It’s essentially the von Mises approach, evolved and adapted for composites. In Onset, we separate the strains in the fiber and matrix, looking at the full 3D state of strain, and evaluate them independently.”

Not “damage progression”

CES emphasizes that Onset Analysis is not the traditional “damage progression” approach to composite failure analysis. “From a design standpoint,” it notes, “if your material has failed prior to its target load, the design has failed. Why go further?”

The Onset Analysis methodology instead “looks for the beginnings, the onset, of failure in the material as design criteria instead of catastrophic failure. Of course in composite design, it would be impractical (and unnecessarily limiting) to design to the first microscopic critical value, so our analysis can also look for the initiation of higher-order events, like fiber unloading, initiation of delaminations or even estimates of laminate unloading. All of this without damage progression.”

Onset Analysis can be used to evaluate static strength of composite details including bolted joints, bearing, bearing-bypass, and especially matrix-dominant problems such as bonded joints and bonded repairs. “It is the only current method that can accurately assess matrix issues,” the company declares. The method can also be used to look at problems such as compression after impact (CAI) and fatigue.

Offerings

Composite simulation—“Use critical properties of the fiber and matrix to predict critical matrix and fiber failures and compute margin of safety, for any layup or geometry, without laminate testing.”

Consultation—“We bring industry-leading expertise in composite performance to your design and analysis challenges.”

Software development—”Our experts in software development process, frameworks and execution can help set up your team for success.”

People

CES’s key people introduce themselves:

Doug Neill, CEO and founder—“I am an innovation-focused, action-oriented, transformational software executive with decades of experience in the computer-aided engineering (CAE) space. At CES, we believe that the ICME materials revolution is stagnating due to a lack of pragmatic, easy-to-use and fast methods for validation of designs comprised of ICME materials. I have spent my entire technical career focused on automated design and design engineering simulation tools. Our company brings this focus and passion to our customers so that they can innovate new structural concepts and effectively and efficiently unlock the benefits of engineered materials. We have a great team of software and engineering experts to assist you.

“I spent 22 years at MSC Software Corporation and was Vice President of the R&D group for 11 of those years. Prior to that, I helped a startup as the Business Development head to position new FE-based design software. At the beginning of my career, I spent 15 years working on the development and application of directed-search automated multidisciplinary optimization software in aerospace and later the CAE industry.”

See our interview with Neill in his VP role at MSC Software published in this blog in 2017.

Jon Gosse, Ph.D.—“I believe that simulation, done right, can radically transform industry. In my 33 years at The Boeing Co., I worked with many talented engineers and scientists to develop practical approaches to evaluating composite design, and applied those methods to solve intractable problems on some of the most important programs in the company. My goal is to bring that knowledge to the world and revolutionize how industry designs with composites and other advanced materials.”

Eddy (Joe) Sharp—“In my 31 years at The Boeing Co. I had many roles. I began my career as a stress analysis, then moved to the development of Boeing’s internal stress analysis software, engineering methods and material allowables, and finally it was my privilege to manage a group of brilliant engineers and scientists working on bringing together structural simulation and materials science to improve composite materials performance. Working with them every day was like getting an advanced degree in a wide-ranging curriculum including solid mechanics, mechanics of composite failure, polymer science and molecular dynamics modeling.

“That background led to a passion for advanced materials and composite analysis, and building practical tools for engineers so they can focus on the design of their part, and not on the quirks and nuances of modeling with esoteric CAE packages.”

Kunaseelan Kanthasamy, Ph.D.—“I embrace the Art of the Possible and am reputed for ‘taking any fresh, blue-sky project from zero to full steam ahead.’ As a visionary thought leader, I continuously move people, products and companies forward, always connecting the customer’s needs to the end product. In pioneering next-generation digital technology, I build high-performance R&D teams and devise ways to differentiate businesses.

“I thrive in igniting energy around conceiving new products from legacies, capturing new product channels to grow business, strategically anticipating future customer needs, and guiding approaches to the distinctive aspects of doing business in other cultures. My technical acumen includes engineering new digital platforms, pre-NPI, NPI, TRR; enterprise solutions, VAST, RFID, FQC Code, NFC standards/platforms; industry security frameworks, cryptography, symmetric/asymmetric, hash functions, encryption/signatures, Digital Twin and Digital Thread.

“I have filed 36 patents and own 21, and won 16 product innovation awards.”

Computational Engineering Software, LLC

Integrated computational materials engineering

von Mises yield criterion

Generative Design tool ‘thinks like an engineer’ enabling designers to explore ideas

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MSC Software Corporation (MSC), a global leader in Computer-Aided Engineering (CAE) simulation software and services and part of Hexagon’s Manufacturing Intelligence division, released MSC Apex Generative Design 2020, a tool that enables engineers to explore new approaches and optimize any part of their design in one step to develop innovative products up to 80% faster than conventional approaches.

MSC Apex Generative Design generates lightweight and smoothed preliminary component concepts based on just the engineering goals. It does away with the iterative process of eliminating unsuitable candidates, freeing up the engineer’s time to explore the design space and find more optimal and novel solutions by fine tuning pre-vetted, manufacturing-ready designs.

With MSC Apex Generative Design:

–A surgeon can create a smarter, latticed implant design that’s pre-validated for additive manufacturing and the same weight as the bone it replaced, improving biocompatibility to encourage muscle attachment and patient comfort.

–The aerospace engineer can redesign a product part-by-part for lightweighting, confident in maintaining the same performance and safety while improving efficiency.

–An automotive designer can build a motorcycle chassis that is 56% lighter than previous iterations, improving range while saving on fuel consumption.

–Manufacturers can exploit the capabilities of additive manufacturing and optimize their designs to enable first-time-right part production for entirely new products.

MSC Apex Generative Design can run on a normal laptop to generate initial candidates within an hour, and produce a final design within a matter of hours. Adding to its accessibility, the tool is also now equipped with an intuitive interface, opening its capabilities up to designers and engineers without specialized knowledge of computer aided engineering. Design goals can be set up directly, or set against an existing design from Computer Aided Design (CAD) or directly from CAE models.

MSC Apex Generative Design performs topology optimization and intelligent smoothing in a single step, producing parts with low distortion risk and ‘bionic’ printable geometries. The resulting parts are automatically designed for performance, balancing the material use with strength requirements and stress distribution.

Users can link MSC Apex Generative Design with industry-leading manufacturing simulation tools Simufact Additive for metals and Digimat AM for polymers to reduce build failures and make optimal use of materials at every step.

The new tool was first announced in November 2019. This first major release introduces new controls that make it easier for designers to adjust the complexity of the generated designs and how much the fixation points can be reduced. It also exploits many productivity benefits of the underlying MSC Apex platform, for example direct export of engineered models (mesh) to Computer Aided Design (CAD) formats so that generative design optimisation can be used within common CAD/CAM manufacturing workflows.

Hexagon | MSC Software
www.mscsoftware.com/product/msc-apex-generative-design

 

Autodesk makes Generative Design in Autodesk Fusion 360 more available to users

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Autodesk is making it easier for customers to take advantage of the features and functions of generative design with the Fusion 360 Generative Design Extension subscription offering. The company is offering unlimited access to the generative design functions as a separate subscription, at either $1,000 monthly or $8,000 annually.

Wheels for a Briggs supercar developed with Generative Design software. Image courtesy of Briggs Automotive Company

The introductory pricing is for a limited time. Through July 17, annual subscriptions to Fusion 360 and the Generative Design Extension are available for 50% off the regular price.

MJK Performance used generative design technology to create a set of lighter and stronger triple clamps for a drag bike.

For those who prefer to pay as they go, access to the generative design extension will continue to be available using Autodesk Cloud Credits.

Autodesk
www.autodesk.com

Structural analysis of a wheel fitted with a pneumatic tire

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Correctly defining boundary conditions is of vital importance when using finite element analysis (FEA). As with any simulation or calculation, if the input is rubbish, the output will also be rubbish. For structural analysis, the important boundary conditions are the fixtures preventing movement of the structure and the external forces acting on it.

Dr. Jody Muelaner, PhD CEng MIMechE

For wheels fitted with pneumatic tires, defining the boundary conditions properly can be particularly challenging. The forces acting on the rim of the wheel are caused by air pressure within the tire and by the ground reaction force transferred through the tire. Defining these forces in a realistic way requires some thought and without experience of this type of problem, the most significant force could easily be overlooked. Luckily, considerable work has been done in this area and so we can apply standard methods to correctly define the boundary conditions. This means that it’s not necessary to include the tire in the FEA and it can be represented by a few simple boundary conditions, determined by a combination of analytical and empirical methods.

Detailed models of tire-ground and tire-rim interactions
Before we get into the practical methods for applying boundary conditions to a wheel, let’s take a moment to consider the alternative. If we don’t make any assumptions about how the tire will impart forces on the rim, we would need to first model how the tire makes contact with the ground. This might be idealized as a toroidal or cylindrical face of the tire making contact with a planar ground surface. This would respectively result in a point or line contact initially, with corresponding infinite force. The tire then deforms to produce a contact patch. This type of contact analysis always requires an iterative solution but is relatively straightforward when the contact is between two linear elastic solids. However, although the compression of the air within the tire is elastic, the casing of the tire will undergo large deformations and there are significant damping effects. It is this damping that often accounts for most of the rolling resistance when a wheel rolls over a firm surface. Modeling these effects requires non-linear material models, adding significantly to the complexity of the analysis. The complexity doesn’t end there as the tire is not made up of a homogeneous isotropic solid material. Tires have anisotropic textile casings and bead wires, encased in a rubber matrix. Modeling this type of composite structure becomes extremely complex. It is only when all of this has been simulated that the deformation into a contact patch and the transfer of force from the ground into the rim can be determined.

Analysis of the forces acting on rim
A typical wheel consists of a central hub with a disk that supports the rim. The rim has flanges at each side which prevent sideways movement of the tire and bead seats which hold the tire radially. It is through the bead seats that the ground reaction force is transferred. The parts of a rim are labeled in the photo below.

The part of a tire which contacts with the ground is the tread. The tread generally has an approximately cylindrical outer surface, although it may be toroidal, especially for tires used on bikes, which lean into corners. In common usage, tread may only refer to the outer textured surface which makes direct contact with the ground but the term is used here to refer to the entire thickness of the horizontal part of the tire. The sides of the tire, which extend vertically to meet the tread at each size is known as the sidewall. The inner circumference of each sidewall is referred to as the bead. The bead is supported radially by the bead seat of the rim and is contained axially by the rim flange. The bead may contain wire to help it resist the radial force caused by the air pressure within the tire. The parts of a tire are shown below.

The air within the tire exerts uniform pressure on all internal faces of the tire and rim, the inflation pressure, P. The simplest boundary condition for the wheel is where any surfaces of the rim not covered by the tire are exposed to this pressure. Where the inflation pressure acts on the inside of the tread, it is contained by the tire casing and bead, causing internal hoop stresses in the tire but no reaction forces on the rim. Where the inflation pressure acts on the sidewall of the tire, it is resisted at the outer circumference of the sidewall by the tread and the inner circumference by the rim flange. The resulting reaction force, Fs, is an important boundary condition for the wheel. Note that in the below diagram, the force Fs is shown acting on the tire, the force acts on the wheel in the opposite direction.

To calculate the reaction force, Fs, we need to consider the axial component of the inflation pressure, and the area over which it acts. It acts over the area of the sidewall, projected onto the vertical plane, which is given by:

If we assume that the force on the sidewall is divided equally between the tread and the rim flange, the force is given by:

 

Ground reaction forces have three components: Radial force due to the vehicle’s weight, tangential force caused by acceleration and braking, and axial force caused by cornering. These forces are distributed according to a cosine function over a region of the bead seat and rim flange related to the tire’s contact patch. The range of this distributed load is given by an angle of loading, θ. There are no analytical methods to determine the loading angle. It depends on the shape of the rim, the shape and stiffness of the tire, the tire pressure, and the ground reaction force. The loading angle may be determined experimentally or a worst-case value may be used. To use the worst-case value, multiple simulations are carried out with different loading angles to determine how the angle affects the stress in the wheel. It can be assumed that it will not be smaller than the contact patch of the tire which can be easily observed. The ground reaction may create a cyclic loading in the wheel if the wheel contains periodic spokes. This is because the stress state when the ground reaction is centered on a single spoke is different from the stress state when the ground reaction is between two spokes. For every revolution of the wheel, each spoke will experience one cycle which should be taken into account for fatigue calculations.

There can be up to five forces acting on the rim, although axial and tangential reactions are not always present:
• Inflation pressure, P, acting uniformly on the internal faces of the rim, not in contact with the tire.
• Sidewall pressure reaction, Fs, acting on both rim flanges.
• Radial ground reaction, Fv, distributed sinusoidally over both bead seats
• Axial cornering reaction, FA, distributed sinusoidally over one of the rim flanges depending on cornering direction.
• Tangential braking or cornering reaction, FT, acts over the same region of the bead seats as the vertical ground reaction and is also sinusoidally distributed, with the tangential load transfer related to the normal force.

Practical issues of applying boundary conditions in FEA software
Before attempting to apply the tire forces to the rim, a few changes should be made to the solid model to simplify the analysis. Firstly, the faces of the bead seats must be split at the extents of the load angles. It is also a good idea to cut the wheel in half so that symmetry can be used to simplify the model. It may also be useful to de-feature the model to further reduce meshing and solution times. For example, by removing external fillets and other small features that won’t affect the stress significantly. It may even be worth extracting mid surfaces and meshing using shell elements.

In addition to the forces applied to the rim, fixtures will be needed at the hub. This is probably best achieved using a frictionless support on the inner face in contact with the hub and bolt connectors at the holes.

In this example, an inflation pressure of 0.345 N/mm2 (50 psi) was simulated. With a bead seat radius of 163 mm and a tread inner radius of 268 mm this results in a sidewall gives a reaction force of 24,525 N. The ground reaction force is 2 kN and the sinusoidal distribution can be applied using a bearing load. Because of the symmetry in the model these forces are halved.

The final von Mises stress results, following H-adaptive meshing, are shown below. The greatest stress occurs at the radius between the bead seat and the rim flange. This is a result of the bending stress caused by the sidewall reaction force. The ground reaction force has surprisingly little effect on the stress field, only increasing the peak stress by 3%. This really highlights how important it is to fully consider how the air pressure is transferred through the tire.

Found Faster: How searchable databases speed CAD design

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Searchable databases do away engineers’ need to recreate CAD files. As for importing models, CAD translators keep costs down.

Jean Thilmany, Senior Editor

Engineers spend nearly two hours each day searching for or recreating parts that already exist, according to a survey done by Cadenas PartSolutions, a Cincinnati maker of parts management software. That number represents a significant loss of time engineers could otherwise be spending on more valuable projects.

By doing away with the need to search or recreate, engineers could get back those 1.8 hours each day: an obvious financial win. The key is to give engineers an easy way to find already-existing CAD models that can be dropped into assemblies. That way, they don’t have to recreate the wheel each time they design. If a company can standardize and reuse simple parts like fasteners, it can save a huge number of engineering hours.

But part reuse can be difficult if locating designs is a problem to begin with. How can engineers know if the CAD design for a part already exists if they don’t know where, or how, to begin looking?

The answer is a searchable database. In the past, these types of parts libraries were the purview of large companies with many decentralized parts databases that sprawled across divisions. But within the past decade or so, the search technology has increasingly become available to companies of all sizes.

In 2013, IBM implemented what it called a strategy for the reuse of assets.

“Developing an orchestrated process to maximize the reuse of assets across the product lifecycle increases design efficiencies and tames product complexity,” according to the 2014 IBM article “Strategic reuse and product line engineering” authored by Eran Gery, IBM distinguished engineer, and Joanne Scouler, IBM curriculum architect.

Companies that make products like vehicles, medical devices, and consumer electronics make multiple products that share common elements, which results in “product lines” or “product families.” Reuse of assets across a product line or family is a major efficiency improvement for easing product design pressures, the authors say.

In the article, they outline the reuse system IBM has put into place, which is built upon the company’s IBM Rational systems and software engineering platform.

The company found that without a part-reuse system, companies:
• Waste time and money developing components that already exist in other company products.
• Needlessly change and recreate assets that already exist.
• Compromise product quality by following an error-prone manual process.
• Make needless changes to existing assets.

While IBM was able to implement its program on its own software engineering platform, other companies don’t have a home-grown platform in place. They can, however, use third-party applications to create searchable parts libraries that help do away with needless part recreation.

For example, Parker-Hannifin, the maker of motion and control systems, recently implemented Cadenas Part Strategic Part Management software to streamline the reuse of 3D parts across several of the company’s divisions. The software is comprised of a searchable, centralized database of 3D parts and data that engineers use to find the component they need. They can search based on part geometry, topology, text, sketch, or dimensions.

The project’s payoff is the capability to reuse internal components across all Parker divisions and in the reduction in time spent finding parts, says Tim Thomas, Cadenas PARTsolutions chief executive officer.

All Parker-Hannifin’s divisions were brought onto the common parts management system, which included an enterprise part-numbering strategy, he adds.

Going Up? Coming Together
When a company grows by acquiring other companies, it often must fold in different IT and CAD environments along with the purchases. Because those systems don’t “talk” to one another, they prevent engineers from finding all parts that exist in the company’s CAD systems. This is another way a centralized database hastens CAD file reuse.

Take the example of The Wittur Group, a German company that makes a range of elevator components that include gearless drives, slings, safety gears, cars, and braking systems. Customers are global elevator installers including Kone, Otis, Schindler, and Hitachi as well as smaller, independent installers.

Through the years, as Wittur grew to become an international company, it brought newly acquired businesses’ IT systems onboard as well. It also maintained the acquired company’s CAD files of existing parts, says Markus Aichinger, corporate CAD manager at Wittur.

Soon, the company’s diverse CAD environments prevented engineers from easily finding those parts, he adds. Data was stored in different legacy databases, each with its own material codes, norms, and structure, which had to be sifted through individually, he says.

Not surprisingly, the process of discovering whether a CAD part already existed or needed to be redesigned took a lot of time.

In addition to making the search process easier, Wittur also wanted to reduce the number of duplicate parts to avoid confusion, Aichinger says.  “Our engineers were having difficulty finding existing parts for new projects, so they preferred redesigning them, even though, in many cases, a similar part existed. The continuous duplication of parts also required additional storage space.”

In addition to time spent designing a new part, engineers also spent time prototyping and testing the part, adding further costs, he adds.

Wittur officials at the company knew what they needed: a searchable system that linked company databases and eliminated duplicate parts.

“This system would help us find existing parts for reuse in new projects and provide global users with a single point of entry to find up-to-date production drawing information,” Aichinger says.

To search 3-D CAD geometry, Wittur implemented the Exalead OnePart application from Dassault Systèmes. The system includes a shape-search feature, which locates parts that match the original shape and also displays close-matches in the search results. The tool identifies master parts for reuse to ensure engineers select the preferred part without recreating a part that already exists in the design library, says Gian Paolo Bassi, chief executive officer at Dassault Systèmes SolidWorks.

To find 2-D drawings, the elevator-parts supplier created a drawing information system that runs on the Exalead platform.

“We’re not only able to find the 2-D drawings themselves, but all the metadata—part tolerances, material information, and where drawings are used— associated with each drawing. We can also display a component’s design history and show the latest revisions,” Aichinger says. “Before we had this, our engineers would have to search for this information in different sources.”

Bassi calls Exalead OnePart a “borderline artificially intelligent product” because it recognizes and flags part similarities, he says.

When an engineer finds a particular part within the CADSeek Polaris system, they also find other information associated with the part, including cost, supplier names, manufacturing information, and analysis results, says Rick Mihelic, a former engineering systems manager at Peterbilt Motors, which stores searchable part information on the CADSeek Polaris platform from iSeek of Ames, Iowa.

CADSeek searching parts to find matches

The tool locates existing parts and assemblies using shape alone, text-based attributes alone, or a combination of the two. It also identifies duplicate parts, which allows for cost savings through parts consolidation, standardization, and part-number reduction, Mihelic says.

Typically, CAD models are only classified based on text-based attributes, which are rarely complete or uniformly applied. But even if attributes could be complete and uniform, two items labeled as “valves” can be so different that applying analytics is a waste of time. With the CADSeek system, each time an engineer searches a dataset, such as valves, they can apply similarity thresholds. For instance, an engineer might ask the system to show all models with at least 91% or greater similarity to the valve used for the search, says Abir Qamhiyah, iSeek Corp’s chief executive officer.

But engineers aren’t company employees that reuse CAD parts. For other personnel, who aren’t always at their desktops, iSeek recently introduced CADSeek Mobile, that lets users take 2-D photos of parts on their Android, IOS or Windows mobile device and to use those images to automatically search their company’s 3-D CAD databases for the piece pictures or for a similarly shaped part.

Manufacturers like Moen and Embraer use iSeek’s original shape-based search application, CADSeek Polaris. At those companies, designers and supply chain personnel use the application to find CAD data for part reuse, to standardization opportunities, for vendor price analysis, should-cost estimation, automated quotations, mergers and acquisitions, and for data cleanup and consolidation, Qamhiyah says.

Small parts in particular often lose their identifying numbers, no matter whether that inventory is housed in an assembly plant, distribution center or out in the field. When those vital identifying numbers disappear and parts can’t be easily reordered, perfectly good parts are scrapped or time is wasted, he adds.

Getting the Design Inside
Now let’s take the opposite problem: how to best bring a CAD design into a system so that it can be used to create a part.

a CAD assembly and part on the Hoops CAD translation platform from TechSoft

The additive manufacturing industry needs to get manufacturing data into their systems. It’s traditionally used stereolithography files, though they can be error prone, says Gavin Bridgeman, CTO at TechSoft 3D, which makes CAD translation software. By directly reading both native and standard CAD file formats, products can increase their ease-of-use and ultimately their print quality.

Techsoft 3D’s Hoops Exchange toolkit does this for engineering-specific applications including many in the 3D printing market, he says. “We’ve seen a lot of growth recently related to people creating new software to solve problems in engineering data markets that didn’t exist a few years ago, like additive manufacturing service bureaus,” Bridgeman says.

The bureaus import 3-D CAD data from creators, use HOOPS Exchange to translate those files, and then print from them.

“People can put more manufacturing information into their 3-D files, but they also know how they want something to look visually,” Bridgeman says. “Service bureaus have to meet both manufacturing and visual needs.”

Whether an engineer wants to find a CAD model within a huge system or needs to import a model to create a 3-D printed part, search and translate technologies step in to slash engineering costs.

Cadenas PartSolutions
partsolutions.com

Dassault Systèmes
www.3ds.com

iSeek
www.iseek.com

TechSoft 3D
www.techsoft3d.com

Siemens delivers Artificial Intelligence-powered CAD sketching technology

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Siemens Digital Industries Software announced a new solution for capturing concepts in 2D. The NX Sketch software tool enhances sketching in CAD. By changing the underlying technology, users are  able to sketch without pre-defining parameters, design intent, and relationships. Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to infer relationships on the fly, users can move away from a paper hand sketch and truly create concept designs within NX software. This technology offers flexibility in concept design sketching, and makes it easy to work with imported data, allowing rapid design iteration on legacy data, and to work with tens of thousands of curves within a single sketch. With these latest enhancements to NX, Siemens’ Xcelerator portfolio continues to bring together advanced technology, even within the core of modeling techniques, helping remove the traditional barriers users have experienced to dramatically improve productivity.

Analysis has shown that in an average day or workflow, around 10% of a typical user’s day is spent sketching. In addition, within current design environments most concept sketching is happening outside of the CAD software due to the level of rules and relationships that must be decided on and built into the sketch by the user up front. Often designers in concept design stage do not necessarily know what the final product may be, which requires a sketching environment that is flexible and can evolve with the design. NX offers the flexibility of 2D paper concept design within the 3D CAD environment, as the first in the industry to eliminate upfront constraints on the design. Instead of defining and being limited by constraints such as size or relationships, NX can recognize tangents and other design relationships to adjust on the fly.

“Sketching is at the heart of CAD and is critical to capturing the intent of the digital twin,” said Bob Haubrock, Senior Vice President, Product Engineering Software at Siemens Digital Industries Software. “Even though this is an essential part of the process, sketching hasn’t changed much in the last 40 years. Using technology and innovations from multiple past acquisitions, Siemens is able to take a fresh look at this crucial design step and modernize it in a way that will help our customers achieve significant gains in productivity and innovation.”

Siemens Digital Industries Software
www.sw.siemens.com
www.plm.automation.siemens.com/global/en/products/mechanical-design/2d-and-3d-cad-modeling.html

 

2020 & beyond: 6 more megatrends to watch in engineering modeling & simulation

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Bruce Jenkins | Ora Research

Early last year we reviewed in this blog post eight megatrends in engineering modeling and simulation that dominate the thinking and decision-making of engineering organizations and their technology providers today, and that we believe will continue to do so well into the years ahead. We wrote then:

This second decade of the twenty-first century is witnessing an explosion of invention and innovation in digital engineering technologies unrivaled since the 1980s, when so many foundational tools and methods were either created or brought to practical fruition. Here are eight megatrends that we believe will drive generational leaps forward in engineering modeling and simulation technologies, methods and work processes through 2020 and well beyond:

  • Simulation-led, systems-driven product development.
  • Democratization of engineering modeling and simulation.
  • Simulation app revolution.
  • Design space exploration.
  • Topology, materials and process optimization for additive manufacturing.
  • Simulation for the Industrial IoT and Industry 4.0.
  • Big-data analytics in simulation.
  • Cloud HPC for simulation.

Now, here are six more large-scale trends that we think are already beginning to drive major technology developments and end-user investments aimed at fostering cost, schedule, quality, performance and innovation improvements in the engineering and production of discretely manufactured products (many will benefit process manufacturers and other AEC industry participants as well):

  • 21st– century data management: Separate the data from the data model (Aras, Onshape, Frustum…).
  • From PIDO to fully automated design space exploration: 20+ years of evolution—then a revolution.
  • New requirements-management technologies that automatically link—via new systems-level engineering technologies—requirements fulfillment during the course of system-level product design (MapleSIM, Simulink…) back to digitally captured system requirements definitions (SysML, Rational Rhapsody…), and automatically track and report divergences and convergences between the two as the design evolves.
  • Generative design design space exploration: What’s alike? What’s different? When is each appropriate?
  • AI and ML (machine learning) in engineering modeling and simulation—the next steps beyond big-data analytics for simulation.
  • Further breakthroughs in co-simulation: Simultaneous instead of step-wise simulation of multiple physical domains, and at multiple (mixed) fidelities—0D, 1D, 2D, 3D; also 4D and 5D in AEC.

Previews

21st– century data management

Aras’s insight to separate the data from the data model makes them, a bit ironically, the technology vendor that will relieve legacy PLM vendors of the prohibitive burden of somehow hoisting their SQL-based PDM offerings into the cloud, yet still link them into today’s truly “open” world. Because Aras’s technology architecture has already done it for them, before them.

And without charging a penny for the technology. Aras makes its software available as freeware. Users can download, evaluate, and implement it in production usage—all for zero dollars. If users then need customization and integration to link into their unique multi-application environments, Aras is available to do this, for fair and reasonable service fees. An extraordinarily apt 21st-century business model, we think.

From PIDO to fully automated design space exploration: 20+ years of evolution—then a revolution

This breakthrough was sparked by HEEDS from Red Cedar Technology, a paradigm-disrupting startup that commercialized university-developed technology under the leadership of Bob Ryan, and was subsequently acquired by Siemens PLM. HEEDS has set a new direction now being pursued by almost every major DSE technology provider.

Generative design vs. contemporary design space exploration

When early adopters of generative design technology discover what fully automated design space exploration technology can do, will they feel underserved by their generative-design technology providers putting forth tools that still require, today, an arguably unnecessary exertion of effort by engineers and designers in making decisions that the software should be making for them?

Or, instead, is generative design an entirely appropriate technology for disciplines and end-user markets where not all problems and sought-for outcomes can be expressed in an entirely determinative manner? The jury is still out on this one, we believe. After users gain more experience with both approaches—and with continuing maturation of both technology classes—time will tell.

Looking forward

Watching the answers to all these questions take shape is going to be fascinating. We greatly look forward to following and reporting here on these and many more game-changing technologies and trends as they unfold in the quarters and years to come. Stay tuned!

Selected background reading

Aras acquires Comet Solutions

HEEDS MDO

MapleMBSE from Maplesoft radically expands accessibility of model-based systems engineering

CosiMate from Chiastek: Co-simulation conduit for multifidelity systems modeling

Cloud-native CAD will disrupt the PLM platform paradigm

Altair announces major updates to its software

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Altair, a global technology company providing solutions in product development, high-performance computing (HPC), and data analytics, announced a significant software update. All of Altair’s software products have been updated with new features, including intuitive workflows that empower users to streamline product development, allowing customers to get to market faster.

The software update release expands on the number of solutions available for designers, engineers, and others to drive better decisions and accelerate the pace of innovation. It broadens the scope of the new user experience, enables access to more physics, data analytics, and machine learning, and makes the Altair software delivery method more flexible and accessible.

Some of the highlights:
• Structures
–Altair HyperWorks – new interface to Altair’s solution for high-fidelity computer-aided engineering (CAE) modeling and visualization, making learning easy and productivity high
–New subsystem entity for modular model configuration
–Altair SimLab – fatigue optimization
–Altair OptiStruct ¬– includes the addition of new explicit solution and expanded implicit non-linear solutions including 2D axisymmetry
–Altair SimSolid – includes advanced 3D seam weld connections to further improve speed
–Altair Radioss – employs a dramatic reduction in runtimes for virtual drop testing of electronics devices

• Fluids and Thermal
–HyperWorks CFD – provides engineers and experienced computational fluid dynamics (CFD) specialists with the most productive CFD pre- and post-processing capabilities to-date
–Altair AcuSolve – GPU acceleration yields 3-4 times increased speed while also supporting nucleate boiling, radiation, condensation/evaporation and multiphase fluid-structure interaction (FSI)
–Altair ultraFluidX – includes a new, more accurate wall model and overset grid technique
–Altair nanoFluidX – is three times faster than the previous version

• Industrial Design and Structures
–Altair Inspire integration of Altair SimSolid solver includes support and connector reaction forces, instantaneous reaction time modeling large PolyNURBS models, and improved geometry generation from optimization
–Inspire Studio – advanced morphing of any geometry type

• Manufacturing
–3D printing simulation available in Inspire with new unit cell lattice generation

• Electromagnetics and Multiphysics
–SimLab – electric motor modeling and coupling with AcuSolve and Altair Flux; accommodates ECAD file import (ODB++)
–Altair Feko – provides a component library tightly integrated with CADFEKO
–Altair FluxMotor now includes thermal and acoustics evaluation
–Flux includes several enhancements including those for modeling iron losses and skew type motors

• Systems Modeling
–Altair Activate – performs multi-physics system modeling with hardware-in-the-loop and Internet of Things (IoT) for digital twin development
–Integration of EDEM bulk material modeling with multibody dynamics simulation and hydraulics ideal for heavy equipment and agricultural applications
–Altair MotionView – has a two-wheeler vehicle dynamics library for motorcycles and scooters
–Altair Compose – OpenMatrix Language available in Jupyter Notebook
–Altair Embed – supports three additional target and two additional target families from ST Micro, VRTOS code modifications for MISRA compliance, and OpenCV DNN (Deep Neural Network) module integration

• Data Analytics
–Recent release of Altair Panopticon – platform for user-driven monitoring of real-time data – includes major update of cloud-based deployment, enabling users to build, modify, and share custom-designed functions and content easily via standard web browsers; hotfix to enable deployment at Nomura
–Altair Knowledge Hub – improved messages for troubleshooting and robustness; security hardening; more flexible Windows deployment; deployment on Azure; transformations including continuous binning and lookup join (refactoring for performance) and more
–Altair Monarch – complex Excel input support – “Excel Trapping”; PDF extraction improvements; user experience and UI improvements; enhanced column list and more
–Altair Knowledge Studio – new features including Keras model, model stacking, and pivot table; variable transformations node improvements with dataset and variable preview and re-ordering

• Smart Product Development
–Altair SmartWorks – major re-architecture of the edge orchestration and augmentation; ability to validate the edge application in real-time environments and deploy at scale

• HPC and Cloud
–Altair Access – updated “work from home” features; more responsive 3D remote visualization; internationalization; better job resource charts; two-factor authentication and single sign-on; share support on mobile
–Altair Accelerator – EDA workload support on AWS (with Rapid Scaling), Microsoft Azure, and GCP; 10x faster for dynamic workloads; container improvements; REST query API; IPv6
–Altair PBS Professional – scalability improvements towards exascale; Cray Shasta support; container enhancements for converged AI+HPC workloads; better system maintenance support

All products are available through the Altair licensing model, making access to all Altair’s software broader and more flexible.

Altair
www.altair.com/2020

Look up in the sky, it’s CAD software

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A major CAD vendor is betting the modeling software’s future is in the cloud

By Jean Thilmany, Senior Editor

Onshape set off ripples across the computer-aided design community five years ago when it announced its computer-aided design software would exist completely in the cloud. Last fall, PTC acquired Onshape.

The purchase signals PTC’s conviction that engineering companies are ready to embrace CAD in the cloud. The SaaS model, while nascent in the CAD and PLM market, is rapidly becoming the industry’s best practice across most other software domains, said Jim Heppelman, PTC president and chief executive officer.

By bringing Onshape in-house, the software maker has placed itself ahead of the pack in what the engineering software maker sees as the inevitable industry transition to SaaS, Heppelmann said.

“Today, we see small and medium-sized CAD customers in the high-growth part of the CAD market shifting their interest toward SaaS delivery models, and we expect interest from larger customers to grow over time,” he said.

In the future, CAD sellers may reach unique arrangements with resellers to bring CAD in the cloud to a wider user base, according to one potential reseller.

But PTC isn’t going all-in with the cloud. It will continue to offer its on-premise CAD software, Creo.

With CAD in the cloud, designs reside on the software provider’s secure server —rather than on individual workstations. Because the software is accessed and managed online, engineers and designers can work on their models from any location and on any device. The SaaS refers to a provider’s capability to deliver everything needed to run CAD in the cloud—including the cloud infrastructure and the CAD software itself.

Though other CAD makers do offer some type of cloud capability, it’s generally the capability to check files into and out of an application on a cloud-based server; engineers don’t design directly with cloud-based software on other applications, said Jon Hirschtick, president of SaaS, PTC. Onshape differs in that its software exists fully in the cloud and can be used by multiple users in real-time, he added. (Hirschtick founded SolidWorks in 1993 and then went on to co-found Onshape with another former SolidWorks chief executive officer, John McEleny.)

The everyday cloud
You’re already using cloud technology. That’s almost certain. If you have an email account ending in gmail.com or yahoo.com, if you’ve checked a social media account from your desktop or mobile device, if you’ve streamed a movie via Netflix or Amazon or any other provider, you’re a cloud user. The email, social media, and streaming software exist on the software owner’s server (let’s say Google), as does your little piece of it—like your Gmail email address.

Though it’s been possible to run CAD as a SaaS for the past few years, CAD has always been slower than other large, graphic-intense and complex applications to pivot to new platforms, says Len Williams, content manager at designairspace, which gives engineering companies the capability to run any CAD system in the cloud.

“Last year’s acquisition is a very clear statement that vendors like PTC see cloud as a platform of the future for CAD and for all their other software,” Williams added, calling the acquisition a “Windows-level” move.

“CAD systems were originally based on UNIX running on silicon graphics workstations. Then Windows came along and people were laughing at the thought of using CAD on Windows,” he says. “Now most of the major CAD systems run only on Windows.”

Likewise, the way companies buy their CAD software has evolved, he said.

“We went from the old perpetual model, where you buy the software for a workstation, to today’s subscription-based model, where you rent the software,” Williams said. “The next step is when a CAD vendor is running it for you so don’t have to buy hardware or worry about upgrades.”

Large companies already run CAD in the cloud because of the benefits the delivery method offers, Williams added. The difference is, those companies—the French automotive manufacturer PSA Peugeot Citroen is one example—have the funds to build their own, private clouds. Designers, engineers, and suppliers at those companies can access CAD on the private cloud whatever their location: Tulle, France; Brussels, Detroit, or elsewhere.

Working remotely and sharing with suppliers
For the smaller guys, the cloud can bring the same benefits their larger counterparts already enjoy; mainly real-time working together and version management, Hirschtick said.

“Versioning” is built-in, which means file changes are tracked in a central database in real-time. Because any engineer with permission can access the software from any device with internet connection, engineers in different places can work together on a design, such as a power supply, for example. There’s only one power supply file; Onshape doesn’t copy it. But with cloud, everyone in the world accesses real-time single source of truth database. We’re not passing around copies all over the place, he added.

“If multiple engineers happen to be working on that file at the same time, it’s not a problem. If one engineer rounded a corner and another one drilled a hole, both changes get captured,” Hirschtick said. “If we’re both rounding a corner at the same time, you would see my hand there in real-time—at the same table—and a box around the corner would indicate that another engineer is editing that right now.”

The bigger the team is, the quicker the product development process, as everyone—even suppliers—has visibility into the real-time database rather than a copy of something emailed a week ago.

When the workflows are quicker, engineers have more design time and are more willing to innovate to try new things, he added.

Most cloud service providers automatically update their programs. Thus, IT staff can focus on other tasks and engineers know they are working with the latest version of the applications.

Also, engineers aren’t bound to their workstations. The software exists at one central server while engineers work from many. They can be globally dispersed and can work from home or other locations outside the office.

Smaller companies that scale their workforce and supplier base up and down as projects change also stand to benefit from SaaS CAD software. When suppliers move away from a project, the company can easily suspend their CAD license and use of the CAD system, Williams said.

When the coronavirus began making headlines in early 2020, engineering companies running one Onshape customer with offices in three major Chinese cities particularly welcomed the remote-work capability, Hirschtick said.

“Using Onshape analytics, they showed us where people were working before the virus situation in China,” Hirschtick said. As expected, employees worked at the offices in the three major cities.

“Then they showed a map of activity of first two weeks of virus quarantines and lockdowns in China,” he added. “This time there were 20 little circles in regions all over in China. They could see where their employees logged in remotely.

“It doesn’t matter if employees are caught at home with only an Android tablet, they can still do their work,” Hirschtick said. “Even with the phone they can even do some of their work.

There are cases where running CAD in the cloud just doesn’t make sense. Some companies may use CAD only a small amount of time and will do better essentially renting a CAD program, perhaps through the cloud, Williams said.

With cloud-based systems, issues of total cost of ownership and return on investment are generally murky because companies want to see how cloud applications compare to traditional on-site infrastructure.

“But there are so many intangibles wrapped up in the cloud that it makes it hard to put calculations on it,” said Andrew Sroka, CEO at Fischer International Systems, which helps companies manage identities for on-premise and cloud-based applications. “It’s important to factor in expenses like utility costs and power requirements.”

If you can’t buy, rent
With CAD in the cloud being not if, but when, designairspace has new ways to bring benefit to users and CAD makers; reselling vendor software in the cloud. The company would offer customers workstations with major CAD vendor’s programs already installed. Designairspace can track use, which allows the vendors to charge based on time spent using the programs.

“It would be just like mobile phone plans back in the day, where you buy a plan based on minutes. We can do this with CAD in the cloud,” Williams says. “Let’s say you buy a plan with 500 minutes. If you need it for only one or two days a week, you can buy it in a small, affordable plan that’s a small portion of what it would cost you to buy the software.

“Why limit CAD-in-the-cloud to large companies? In the olden days, only big companies could afford 3-D CAD systems. We want small companies to have cloud benefits,” he added. “They would still need to buy their own licenses, but at least they can run it in the cloud, like the big guys.”

The pricing model would benefit companies with project managers or suppliers who don’t design in CAD but log onto the program intermittently.

“These people use the software only a little bit at a time, so we can price it so it’s not so expensive for them,” Williams said. “This is a whole new market for major vendors.”

Becoming a CAD-in-the-cloud reseller and offering online training in those CAD programs is the “next step” for designairspace, he added. With the business model, potential customers can also receive on-the-spot, specialized training if needed and can test the software to see if it’s right for their needs before buying a priced plan, he said.

Or, engineering companies might choose to run hybrid CAD, in which they host some CAD systems at workstations on-premise and buy CAD in the cloud subscriptions for intermittent users, Williams said.

“That way you can gradually move more and more users to the cloud. You can move one or two and see if it works and if it does move more to the cloud,” Williams said. “The heavy users will never move to the cloud.”

That brings up another point. Workstations that run CAD will always be with us, he added.
Companies that do work for the defense department or for the military must do their engineering work on company workstations. They cannot work remotely, Williams said.
For his part, Hirschtick is dreaming big. He expects widespread cloud adoption for CAD as users begin to see the advantages.

“People think cloud tools don’t have the power or speed but that’s an old fable. Cloud tools have more advantage and speed, it’s not a fair fight,” he said. “With desktop tools, you have one CPU sitting on the desktop. With the cloud, we’re able to use unlimited amounts of CPUs. I gave a demo and opened up ten models with thousands of thousands of parts on Macbook in Chrome on a web browser. There’s no CAD workstation that could open them that fast, even the best desktop configuration.

“In a few years, people will be saying ‘how did you ever do CAD on a desktop. How was it fast enough?’” Hirschtick says.

While the future remains cloudy, PTC is backing clearing skies for CAD in the cloud. With a large CAD maker backing SaaS, expect to see a flurry of news and updates. In other words, don’t delete your desktop program.

PTC
www.ptc.com

Designairspace
www.designairspace.com