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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

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

OnScale and Lexma launch Moebius LBM CFD Solver for advanced fluid dynamics simulations

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OnScale, a global leader in Cloud Engineering Simulation, announces the availability of the Moebius Lattice-Boltzmann Method (LBM) Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) solver on the OnScale Cloud Engineering Simulation platform.

“Moebius represents a step-change in CFD speed, power, and democratization for digital prototyping of devices involving fluid flows,” says David Freed, CTO of OnScale and a Digital Physicist with a 25-year track record of advancing LBM CFD technology at MIT, Exa Corporation, and Dassault Systѐmes. “Moebius running on the massively scalable OnScale Cloud Engineering Simulation platform will break barriers to innovation for a variety of applications such as lab-on-a-chip, MEMS, and medical diagnostic and treatment devices like next-generation ventilators and respirators.”

Airflow simulation in a UV sterilization chamber of an iPAP ventilator for COVID-19 patients.

Unlike Navier-Stokes CFD methods which simulate bulk fluid flow, LBM takes a kinetic theory approach to simulating fluid flows, which enables the simulation of complex biomedical and engineering problems, including multiphase flows (e.g. simulating control and management of multi-species droplets in microfluidic devices), particle transport (e.g. simulating sorting of blood and cancer tumor cells), and fluid-structure interaction (e.g. simulating efficient micro-scale actuators in MEMS applications). The resulting simulations provide unique insight and design guidance for engineers advancing new technologies.

Combining the power of the Moebius solver with the massive scalability of OnScale in the cloud enables both huge simulations and parallel execution of large numbers of simulations on cloud supercomputers.

“Integrating Moebius with the OnScale Cloud Engineering Simulation platform allows our team to focus on our mission – creating the world’s best LBM CFD solutions – while leveraging OnScale’s cloud supercomputer scalability and SimAPI for CAD import, model setup, data management, and viewing simulation results,” says Franck Pérot, CEO of Lexma Technologies. “We also get OnScale’s account management, billing, customer support, and marketing and sales automation features built-in.”

Fighting COVID-19 in Low-Income Countries: How Digital Prototyping Empowers Engineers to Advance the Design of Medical Devices

“With Moebius running on OnScale, we were able to optimize the design of our Intelligent Positive Air Pressure (iPAP) machine with UV disinfecting chamber,” says Shashi Buluswar, CEO of the Institute for Transformative Technology (ITT). “Using OnScale and Moebius to create Digital Prototypes of our device dramatically shortened our physical prototyping cost and time and allowed us to accelerate our goal of delivering critical iPAP devices to low-income countries to save lives during the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Left to right: Simulation iterations from a suboptimal design to an optimized configuration of the iPAP UV sterilizer chamber.

A critical design and engineering aspect of the iPAP device is the UV disinfecting chamber, which is intended to disinfect up to 99.9% of the air exhaled from a COVID-19 patient’s lungs. The ITT team needed to minimize size, cost, and heat generated by the chamber while maximizing the amount of time air spends in it. The team used Moebius running on OnScale to simulate many “Digital Prototypes” of the disinfecting chamber and process until converging on a winning, manufacturable design.

OnScale
ww.OnScale.com

Lexma Technology
www.lexma-tech.com

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

Additive manufacturing used for local PPE solution in Belgium

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Bruce Jenkins | Ora Research

“Over the last month or so, the Coronavirus or COVID-19 pandemic has captured our collective consciousness across the globe and forced us to rethink every aspect of our professional and personal lives,” says Kaustubh Nande, Global Marketing Director at Hexagon’s| MSC Software. “Hexagon too has taken some concrete steps to protect our workforce and to minimize risk to the supply of our products and our services to our customers. For instance, we put in place a work from home program to use our smart manufacturing software packages and put together additional online learning options for manufacturing professionals.

“One interesting project undertaken by our team in Belgium was about using in-house knowledge and available material and tools to solve a specific issue posed by the COVID-19 outbreak. Across the globe, there have been several reports of hospital workers suffering from shortages in Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), due to the unprecedented demand across the world.”

The Hexagon | e-Xstream team at Belgium “heard about a requirement for PPE, specifically face shield holders, in a nearby hospital. The team decided to chip in and do its bit by conceptualizing an additive manufacturing solution to the problem. The team had access to a 3D printer and suitable material within the office. The team first found an open CAD model that was available online and plugged it into the 3D printer and used the design to 3D print some face shield holders right at the Hexagon office.”

The company says that, “backed by a thorough understanding of additive manufacturing techniques and knowledge about the use of Digimat and e-Xstream in plastic printing, the team was able to think smart and deliver on what the doctors required. In the coming weeks we will also be increasing the production count. The finished product met the need for equipment that could protect hospital staff. The key thing is these plastic PPE liners can be disinfected easily and reused by the hospital. Depending on material available you can print in various colors for easy identification.”

MSC concludes, “This gesture by our Belgium team stands out as a great example of how the right hardware and software tools combined with the proper knowledge can bring in quick, practical solutions to solve real-life issues quickly and effectively.”

Work-from-home information

MSC adds: “Our customers, employees, and partners are at the heart of what we do. Our concerns and well wishes go out to all those directly and indirectly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. We are taking the threat very seriously by protecting our workforce and minimizing the risk to the supply of our products and services to you during this time. Across the globe, the measures being put in place to reduce the spread of COVID-19 means that many companies are asking their employees to work from home.

“Our goal is to offer the level of responsiveness and support that you have come to expect from MSC. If there is anything we can help you with, please do not hesitate to contact us. Please visit mscsoftware.com/work-from-home/assistance-programs for complete details on our current assistance programs, as well as check back for additional announcements in the coming days.”

Kaustubh Nande

Hexagon’s COVID-19 information page

Accelerate spatial AR programming of machines and robots

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PTC announced the release of the Vuforia Spatial Toolbox platform. Created by the PTC Reality Lab. This open-source platform helps developers create, innovate, and solve spatial computing problems in a new way. Innovators can explore Industrial Internet of Things (IoT) and Spatial Computing, accelerate prototyping for machines, and develop leading-edge spatial Augmented Reality (AR) and IoT use cases to support digital transformation initiatives.

With this spatial computing platform, teams can improve the operation of complex manufacturing environments and make IoT-enabled machines easier and more intuitive to control with on-the-fly programming. Robots can be operated and controlled through more intuitive user interfaces (UIs), and intuitive Human Machine Interfaces (HMIs) can be quickly built, enabling improved human-machine interaction and merging the digital world and physical screens.

“Many developers, innovators, and researchers recognize that AR can help democratize the programming and control of connected machines,” said Mike Campbell, executive vice president and general manager, AR, PTC. “What they need are solutions that help alleviate development overhead for prototyping these innovative, next-gen AR tools. PTC is helping them develop tools and interfaces to spatially interact with and program the world of interconnected things around them.”

As the newest addition to the Vuforia AR product portfolio, Vuforia Spatial Toolbox complements the current commercial Vuforia offering. The Vuforia Spatial Toolbox is a system consisting of two components which combine to provide an industrial AR/Spatial Computing prototyping environment with pre-built UI/UX elements, spatial programming services, an intuitive UI app, and simplified connectivity to IoT with the Vuforia Spatial Edge Server. The open-source environment is designed to drive further exploration around the convergence of the physical and digital worlds and help to push the boundaries of innovation.

To enable users to take advantage of the new Vuforia Spatial Toolbox while working from home during this crisis, PTC created a basic hardware interface add-on that allows them to connect the Vuforia Edge Server with Arduino projects, children’s LEGO® BOOST and LEGO® Education WeDo 2.0 sets, and the Philips Hue smart lighting system.

The technology is the brainchild of Valentin Heun, Ph.D., vice president, Innovation Engineering, PTC, and former scientist at the MIT Media Lab’s Fluid Interfaces Group, where he led the Reality Editor human-machine interface research. Dr. Heun is a leader in the AR industry, and an active author and speaker on topics related to AR.

PTC
spatialtoolbox.vuforia.com

Generative design for flow applications

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Flow driven generative designer is a new application from Dassault Systèmes. Its intended use is to give users or designers access to simulation capabilities for fluid optimization.

As many designers know, the process of creating a part is typically based on experience and intuition. Generative design, however, offers a different approach. Generative design programs use boundary conditions, set by the designer, to drive and simulate how a part should look. Applications for flow driven generative design include powertrain design, HVAC, jet propulsion, injection molding, and valve and piping design.

Within the program, designers are encouraged to ask different questions. For example, rather than ask, ‘Does this shape meet the requirements?’, the question changes to ‘Which shape best meets the requirements?’

According to Colin Swearingen, generative design expert at Dassault Systèmes, “optimizing fluid flow for a particular component is a difficult process as it incorporates a number of aspects of engineering.” These aspects create an “over-the-wall” process where various engineering disciplines such as CAD, analysis, simulation, manufacturing, PLM and so on, are siloed and there is little collaboration.

One of the risks of siloed engineering is an increase in the number of data translation errors that can compromise a design. Another drawback is the lack of expertise in more than one engineering discipline. Few companies have designers who are experts in CAD, CFD, and analysis.

Thus, in a typical traditional design process, a designer begins with a design space and sets up boundary conditions. In the case of fluid, what are the inlet conditions and what are the outlet conditions? Are there any other restraints that need to be applied to the model?
Then the design is handed off to an analyst, who must then mesh the data and prepare it for a CFD model run.

The new shape also needs to be validated. In a typical design process, that’s a different tool that is used to compute the flow analysis as opposed to optimizing the shape to begin with.
So, designers do their best version of the design. However, it quickly becomes an iterative process every time a change is made.

The flow driven generative program is in the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, which also includes other engineering tools, such as CAD, simulation, analysis, optimization, and manufacturing. All of these are unified into one environment so that a designer can streamline the design process. This platform makes the process intuitive, helping users optimize the design earlier and eliminates all the data translations required in other tools and platforms.

In Flow driven generative, once the designer is satisfied with the initial iteration of the design, they simply click a button to begin a simulation. Then, they can run a flow analysis without leaving the design program.

File exchange is not needed in this process, and no data translation is necessary. Said Swearingen, “It’s intuitive, easy to use, and we really streamline the process. What we see is about a 10-times faster turnaround time.”

The program includes a design assistant that prompts the designer to answer specific boundary questions that help the program create a design.

Noted Swearingen, the program leverages best in class TOSCA fluid technology in the background. Tosca fluid and many of the Tosca applications are typically known as an expert tool. However, that’s being run in the background here. The designer is getting access to this simulation capability without needing to be a full-fledged expert in the program.

The goal of the Flow driven generative program is to remove the bottlenecks that make it cost prohibitive to explore optimized parts. Another goal is to develop a seamless collaboration with design and simulation departments. “In a unified environment,” said Swearingen, “it’s enabling collaboration and opening doors for users in a much more streamlined and efficient manner, to tackle the problems that arise with this type of workflow.”

Dassault Systèmes
www.3ds.com

Dassault Systèmes’ 3DEXPERIENCE World 2020

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Dassault Systèmes announced 3DEXPERIENCE World 2020 February 9-12 at Music City Center in Nashville, Tenn., where 6,000 designers, engineers, makers, entrepreneurs, students and business leaders from all industries can learn, collaborate, innovate and experience the latest 3D technologies driving the Industry Renaissance.

The inaugural 3DEXPERIENCE World builds on the 20-year legacy of Dassault Systèmes’ SOLIDWORKS World events dedicated to the 3D design and engineering community. With a larger selection of learning opportunities, presentations, products, new technologies and experts, attendees can develop and expand their skills to become more inventive, efficient and responsive across the different processes involved in the creation of new experiences that transform how the world thinks, works and lives.

In particular, 3DEXPERIENCE World 2020 will introduce SOLIDWORKS users to new strategies for business innovation through discussions and demonstrations of 3DEXPERIENCE WORKS, Dassault Systèmes’ portfolio of digital applications on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform for collaborative design to manufacturing.

Other event highlights include:

• Keynote presentation from industry thought leader Charles Adler, co-founder and former head of design, Kickstarter.com, Kickstarter.
• Customers, innovators and partners on the cutting edge of design including Sam Rogers, additive design lead and jet suit pilot, Gravity Industries; Mikael Kajbring, CTO, Awake, makers of the Awake electric surfboard; Mike Schultz, founder of performance prosthetic manufacturer, BioDapt; Matt Carney of the MIT Media Lab Biomechatronics group; and more.
• More than 350 technical sessions in the form of lecture-style breakouts, hands-on workshops, and expert-led panel discussions on the latest innovations in 3D design, data management, simulation and manufacturing.
• The 3DEXPERIENCE playground, a dedicated space to discover new technologies, tools and applications from more than 100 partners, experience virtual and augmented reality innovations, participate in hackathon and Model Mania challenges, and see the impact of 3D technology on education and startups.

“We’re continuing the long legacy we’ve built with this community. 3DEXPERIENCE World, like last year’s SOLIDWORKS World, is a unique gathering where 3D enthusiasts can think creatively, network, and be inspired by future technological advances,” said Gian Paolo Bassi, CEO, SOLIDWORKS, Dassault Systèmes. “Past SOLIDWORKS World attendees will still find everything they’ve come to expect each year, but also applications and uses of 3D technology they didn’t expect. First-time attendees will find a large selection of solutions and experts to connect with. We aim to showcase all the possibilities within the vast Dassault Systèmes ecosystem that help our user community to go about their work and successfully achieve their ambitions.”

Dassault Systèmes
www.3dexperienceworld.com

Developing a zero-emission, all-electric regional commuter aircraft

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Dassault Systèmes announced that the electric air mobility pioneer, Eviation Aircraft, used the 3DEXPERIENCE platform on the cloud to develop the first prototype of its zero-emission, all-electric regional commuter aircraft – Alice – in two years.

In the race to create and commercialize new categories of sustainable air mobility systems, Eviation Aircraft accelerated the prototype’s development by deploying the “Reinvent the Sky” industry solution experience based on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform. This scalable cloud solution supported the company’s holistic approach to 3D, composite design and flow simulation with improved collaboration while securing data in a single, standards-based environment.

“The electrification of aircraft isn’t a question of if, but when. As we aim to make clean regional air travel accessible for all, we needed to be able to make a product that people trust, sit in and fly, and do it quickly,” said Omer Bar-Yohay, CEO, Eviation Aircraft. “The right way to go about it was to use tools that we would want to use in the long run, and to work in the cloud to ensure fast, secure access and global collaboration. When we selected the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, we were an early-stage startup with limited resources and time. We’ve developed our commercial-stage prototype faster than we imagined, and have already signed our first customer in the U.S.”

Eviation Aircraft realized that transforming a prototype into a product that can be manufactured by the hundreds each year would require empowering its engineers with the long-term knowledge and know-how to build it to maturity for the next generation.

Once commercialized, Alice will be the world’s first all-electric regional commuter aircraft, capable of carrying nine passengers and two crew on a single charge for 650 miles at 10,000 feet.

Dassault Systèmes
www.3ds.com