News

Comsol Multiphysics Update Includes New Sketching Tool

October 9, 2019 By Jean Thilmany Leave a Comment

Comsol is set to release Comsol Multiphysics Version 5.5 in November 2019. In this version, the Design Module offers a new sketching tool for easier creation and more versatile parametric control of geometry models, says Daniel Bertilsson, technology manager for mathematics and computer science at Comsol.

Comsol Multiphysics offers tools for engineering modeling, simulation, application, and deployment. It solves for multiple physical effects at the same time.

The company made the update announcement at its annual Comsol Conference held in October in Boston.

New and updated solvers speed a range of simulations. Two new add-on products, the Porous Media Flow Module and the Metal Processing Module, further expand on the product’s suite of multiphysics tools.

The new sketching tool makes it easier to assign dimensions and constraints to planar drawings for 2D modeling and 3D work planes.

“We’ve carefully integrated the new dimensions and constraints tool in the Model Builder so it becomes a natural part of the Comsol Multiphysics workflow,” Bertilsson says. “The new tools for dimensions and constraints can be used together with model parameters in Comsol to drive the simulation, whether for a single run, parametric sweep, or parametric optimization.”

Acoustics Simulations

Another update—new solver technology for acoustics simulations—is a nod to ultrasound technology becoming increasingly important in a range of applications from process engineering and nondestructive testing to consumer electronics.

Other new functionality—based on the time-explicit discontinuous Galerkin method—enables efficient multicore computation of ultrasound propagation in solids and fluids. This includes realistic materials featuring damping and anisotropy. The method also has low-frequency applications, such as in seismology. The multiphysics capability included in this new functionality can seamlessly combine linear elastic wave propagation in a solid and its transition to a fluid, as an acoustic pressure wave, and back again.

The new elastic wave functionality is available for users of the Structural Mechanics Module, MEMS Module, and Acoustics Module. The fluid-structure acoustics coupling is available in the Acoustics Module.

Porous Media Flow Module

This module gives users within industries such as food, pharmaceutical, and biomedical a range of transport analysis capabilities for porous media, trying, and transport in fractures. The flow modules cover linear and nonlinear flow in saturated and variably saturated media with special options for slow and fast porous media flows. The multisphycis simulation capabilities are extensive, with functionality that includes options for calculating effective thermal properties for multicomponent systems, poroelasticity, and transport of chemical species in solid, liquid, and gas phases.

Other highlights of this upgrade include:

Import and export of the 3D printing and additive manufacturing formats PLY and 3MF.
Multiple spectral bands for radiation in participating media
Lumped thermal systems equivalent circuits
Combined full wave and ray optics simulations
Minimum-sized standalone application files with Comsol Compiler
Compressible Euler flow and nonisothermal large eddy simulations
Editing tools for repair of STL, PLY, and 3MR files

Comsol Update Includes New Sketching Tool

October 9, 2019 By Jean Thilmany Leave a Comment

Comsol Multiphysics offers tools for engineering modeling, simulation, application, and deployment. It solves for multiple physical effects at the same time.

The company made the update announcement at its annual Comsol Conference held in October in Boston.

The new sketching tool makes it easier to assign dimensions and constraints to planar drawings for 2D modeling and 3D work planes.

Acoustics Simulations

Porous Media Flow Module

Other highlights of this upgrade include:

Import and export of the 3D printing and additive manufacturing formats PLY and 3MF.
Multiple spectral bands for radiation in participating media
Lumped thermal systems equivalent circuits
Combined full wave and ray optics simulations
Minimum-sized standalone application files with Comsol Compiler
Compressible Euler flow and nonisothermal large eddy simulations
Editing tools for repair of STL, PLY, and 3MR files

Wind River offers new release of VxWorks

October 8, 2019 By Leslie Langnau Leave a Comment

Wind River announced the latest release of its real-time operating system (RTOS) VxWorks, which has ensured the security, safety, and deterministic performance of embedded applications for more than 30 years. The latest release redefines embedded software development with new capabilities to drive greater business value, innovation, and productivity.

As the industry rapidly transforms with systems moving from automated to autonomous, there’s a demand for a new approach that enables engineers to use today’s mainstream tools and programming languages for innovating. VxWorks empowers developers of all backgrounds with popular programming languages and libraries, along with cloud-based development tools and infrastructures to create mission-critical applications that require the highest levels of security and safety.

The latest release of VxWorks includes:

• Support for C++17, Boost 1.70.0, Python 3.8, and Rust
• LLVM-based infrastructure which enables support for a broad set of modern and productive tools and frameworks
• Open source board support packages (BSPs) such as Raspberry Pi and TI Sitara AM65x for quick prototyping and flexibility of choice
• OpenSSL 1.1.1 for the most up-to-date cryptography libraries

Complementing VxWorks is Wind River Labs, which offers access to VxWorks–compatible new technologies and collaborative software projects, proof-of-concepts, open source integrations, pre-release and experimental software, including ROS 2, OpenCV, and IoT SDKs for public cloud providers to name a few.

Wind River
www.windriver.com
www.windriver.com/announces/vxworks

Volume Graphics releases new generation of CT Software

July 12, 2019 By Leslie Langnau Leave a Comment

–Volume Graphics announced the latest generation of its software solutions for non-destructive quality assurance with industrial computed tomography (CT): Version 3.3 of VGSTUDIO MAX, VGSTUDIO, VGMETROLOGY, and VGinLINE.

VGSTUDIO MAX software is used for the analysis and visualization of industrial computed tomography (CT) data and covers all requirements related to metrology, defect detection and assessment, material properties, and simulation.

Using the new version, customers can determine the surfaces of multi-material components, export measurement and analysis results to store them centrally in quality-management software, automate inspection processes more flexibly based on text recognition, and translate real CT data into volume meshes for simulation.

To further support their customers, Volume Graphics has also added a Technical Consulting unit that provides professional consulting and evaluation services.

“With version 3.3 of our software solutions, we are once again laying the foundation for customers to make their processes smarter,” says Christof Reinhart, CEO and co-founder of Volume Graphics GmbH.

“For example, using the new data export, metrology data derived with the tremendous measurement capabilities of our software can be seamlessly shared with QA systems, where the values can then be combined and checked over time. More than ever before, this new feature enables customers to better integrate leading-edge CT technology into their existing software landscape. The new export feature is based on the native support of the widely used Q-DAS format, which makes using results in third-party statistical or analysis software especially easy.”

An overview of the innovations in VGSTUDIO MAX 3.3: Multi-material surface determination

–A new mode of the local-adaptive-surface determination enables the simultaneous determination of the surfaces of each material within a volume in one go
–This significantly simplifies the geometric dimensioning and tolerancing of multi-material objects, e.g., the position of metal pins of a connector relative to the plastic housing
–The new mode also facilitates segmentation of multi-material objects

Support of native data export in Q-DAS format

–There is now native support for data export in Q-DAS format for both VGSTUDIO MAX and the VGMETROLOGY metrology solution, as well as the VGinLINE solution for automated CT inspection
–Companies that still work with traditional measurement systems can switch to this comprehensive CT measurement technology without encountering software hurdles or having to forego their established processes for further statistical evaluation
–Export of detailed, CT-based measurement and analysis results (coordinate measurement, nominal/actual comparison, wall thickness analysis, porosity/inclusion analysis, fiber composite material analysis) is now enabled in the common Q-DAS data exchange format

OCR-based automation
–New optical character recognition (OCR) allows customers to read out text in CT scans, such as object identifiers, and store the recognized text in their meta information
–In automated inspection workflows, cavity markers in CT scans of injection molded or cast components can be recognized and the right reference object or the appropriate analysis in VGinLINE jobs can then be selected depending on the respective cavity
–At the same time, the recognized text improves the traceability of the results, since the information about the cavities can be included in the reports

Volume meshing for simulations
–With the new Volume Meshing Module, users can create accurate and high-quality tetrahedral volume meshes from their CT scans for use in mechanical, fluid, thermal, electrical, and other FEM simulations in third party software
–This is based directly on the subvoxel-accurate surface determination for scanned parts or material samples consisting of one or more materials
–The individual components of multi-material objects are translated into volume meshes with congruent tetrahedron faces and shared nodes at material interfaces
–The complete workflow from CT scan to volume mesh is covered
–Generated volume meshes can be exported in common .pat and .inp file formats
–Each cell of the generated volume mesh can be loaded with additional information required for simulation, such as fiber orientations, fiber volume fractions, porosity volume fractions, or gray values

Backed by 20 years’ experience in industrial CT, the new Technical Consulting unit analyzes the specific requirements of each customer’s application(s), creates optimal software configurations and general CT hardware specifications, and offers complete evaluations as a contract service

Volume Graphics
www.volumegraphics.com

ThingWorx 8.5 coming in late summer 2019

June 21, 2019 By wpengine Leave a Comment

ThingWorx 8.5 combines new capabilities with domain-specific solutions to serve the digital transformation needs of industrial enterprises worldwide.

Among the new and enhanced capabilities are tools that simplify the composition and deployment of solutions. Customers will be able to configure applications faster and deploy them across multiple sites and geographies. For those who want more readymade solutions, ThingWorx also offers pre-built, pre-configured capabilities for engineering, manufacturing, and service. This latest version of ThingWorx brings enhanced integration with Microsoft Azure IoT and includes additional tools for rolling out solutions at an enterprise scale.

The new ThingWorx Navigate Digital Change Management Application enables internal and external users to actively participate in change management. The series of ThingWorx Navigate Contribute Apps will expand on NavigateView suite, which makes information easily available and facilitates collaboration across the enterprise. Powered by the digital thread, engineers have real-time access to connected product data in ThingWorx to drive the design of next-generation products.

Manufacturing
ThingWorx 8.5 is now compatible with Rockwell Automation’s FactoryTalk Analytics. Additionally, PTC will be releasing ThingWorx Kepware Edge to provide flexible deployment of reliable and secure connectivity for dispersed equipment.

Service
PTC’s service solution suite enables service organizations to transform from cost centers to profit centers and drive product and service innovation through new IIoT-enabled business models. The service optimization solution allows companies to improve margins by minimizing truck rolls and increasing first time-fix rates. With ThingWorx 8.5, digital
service delivery is enhanced through a deepened integration with Microsoft Azure,
enabling manufacturers to now use the ThingWorx Software Content Management App
with the Azure IoT Hub and Azure IoT Edge.

PTC
ptc.com

PTC announces initiatives for its AR business

June 21, 2019 By WTWH Editor Leave a Comment

PTC announced initiatives to fuel its AR business and strengthen the Vuforia Augmented Reality (AR) platform. These initiatives include enhanced 3D AR model targets, leveraging Azure Spatial Anchor Services, a collaboration with Matterport to further the PTC enterprise reach into factories and other spaces, and the acquisition of an AR services agency, TWNKLS.

“AR redefines how the enterprise works. Across all industrial use cases including
manufacturing, engineering, service and training, AR is improving productivity, reducing
waste, and increasing worker safety and compliance. AR empowers organizations to
digitally transform their products, processes, and people,” said Jim Heppelmann, president
and CEO, PTC. “Our strategic alliances, acquisitions, and groundbreaking technology
highlight PTC’s commitment to helping industrial companies succeed with their digital
transformation initiatives.”

Create step-by-step AR instructions with Vuforia Expert Capture
Industrial customers can use Vuforia Expert Capture to quickly and easily create step-by-step instructions when and where they do their work, leveraging Microsoft HoloLens’ location-aware capabilities enabled by Azure Spatial Anchor Services. Front-line workers can then be safely and effectively guided through procedures by digital content presented at relevant locations in the physical environment. This feature improves the accuracy and speed of educating workers, and reduces training costs.

Vuforia Engine 8.3 enhanced with AI
In addition to providing intuitive AR user interactions, Vuforia Engine 8.3 offers robust AR experiences by harnessing the power of deep learning to provide target recognition capabilities based on the customer’s 3D CAD model. AI-powered, model-based recognition enables a product or machine to be recognized from difficult angles, even in poor lighting environments – enabling easier, faster, and more accurate user experiences.

PTC invests in Matterport to visualize factories
PTC has invested in and partnered with Matterport, a company that offers immersive 3D
technology and spatial capture solutions. By partnering with Matterport, PTC is offering the first AR solution with a focus on factories, plants, and other spaces – and the people who operate them. PTC’s enhanced Vuforia offerings give customers the ability to unify
their factory data and allow them to visualize and interact with a digital twin. The
collaborative solution provides customers an easy way to scan their facility and convert it
into a usable 3D mesh using a Matterport compatible camera.

PTC acquires TWNKLS to help customers deploy and adopt augmented reality
The Netherlands-based TWNKLS is a specialized AR company that develops tailor-made AR applications and experiences and provides AR services to solve the specific challenges faced by enterprise companies. The acquisition will accelerate PTC’s AR strategy as well as enable customers to realize faster time-to-value.

PTC’s Vuforia Experience Platform has been adopted by hundreds of companies
worldwide, including Aggreko, Fujitsu, Global Foundries, Howden, and Volvo.

PTC
ptc.com

Virtalis uses HOOPS Exchange to create rich data

June 6, 2019 By WTWH Editor Leave a Comment

Tech Soft 3D, a leading provider of software development toolkits to engineering software companies, announced that Virtalis is using HOOPS Exchange to create rich data sets that fuel enterprise data models that serve as the visualization backbone for multiple types of applications across the enterprise. Virtalis is a pioneer in the AR/VR industry and provider of immersive visualization solutions that cover the full lifecycle of the product, from conceptual design to distribution.

Visionary Render is Virtalis’ flagship platform for importing and visualizing large datasets from a range of sources, while maintaining all the geometry, naming hierarchies, metadata, and product & manufacturing information (PMI). Virtalis is focused on supporting industrial applications and manufacturers creating large complex products for aerospace, defense and automotive, as well as construction, geoscience, consumer goods, and more. Accurately supporting the formats used in this wide range of industries is critical because companies need to visualize large amounts of data from diverse sources. Being able to review the data in an immersive environment on a one-to-one scale, rather than seeing a 2D view of a 3D object is effective for communicating to people who aren’t skilled in CAD.

“When we import CAD data with HOOPS Exchange, we get the data that we expect,” said Barry King, Product Owner at Virtalis. “Our customers expect to see reliable data when they’re making important decisions based on visualizations and having reliable and dependable data is one of the most important things for them. What’s great about HOOPS is that it supports almost all the formats, including VRML. Our customers have legacy data, and we rely on the fact that HOOPS Exchange supports those formats. Often our customers will challenge us with data and we can say, ‘no problem.’ We can support this wide variety of formats because we have HOOPS behind us.”

Virtalis goes beyond visualizing CAD data from an external view by immersing users in the environment where the model may live, allowing them to experience the product.

“We’re looking at products in the context of where they sit,” said Gavin England, Product Marketing Manager at Virtalis. “We could be looking at a product installed inside a factory, or a building structure coming from building information modeling (BIM) data. In addition to the core formats, being able to bring in data like Revit is key as well.”

HOOPS Exchange provides access to a broad range of data including B-Rep geometry, metadata, PMI, model tree, views, persistent IDs, styles, construction geometry, visualization and more – all without depending on any CAD system. This wide-ranging access proved to be an important element in Virtalis’ decision-making process.

“When we initially were getting to grips and integrating it, Tech Soft 3D was really responsive and collaborated with us to get the results that we needed,” said King. “When we communicate an issue, we always get it fixed in the next release, and the releases come out steadily and reliably.” That’s very important and a real benefit for us. Whether they’re working with engineering or science data, a lot of customers are learning how much time and money they can save by leveraging immersive visualization and not having to build physical prototypes. This helps them make better business decisions – and Tech Soft 3D plays a critical role in supporting those workflows.”

Tech Soft 3D
www.techsoft3d.com

COMSOL Multiphysics includes tools to support 5G, IoT design

June 5, 2019 By Leslie Langnau Leave a Comment

COMSOL announced the latest advances in its COMSOL Multiphysics software to support microwave and RF engineers working on 5G, IoT, automotive radars and satellite communications. With these tools, designers can model different PCB materials and study how they affect the performance of microwave and millimeter wave circuits. Several of the application examples to guide designers will be introduced at the International Microwave Symposium (IMS) 2019.

“We are particularly excited to demonstrate how to set up and run a simulation to design and evaluate a Grounded Coplanar Waveguide (GCPW) line,” said Jiyoun Munn, technical product manager of the RF Module at COMSOL. “Connectors and low loss materials are the key components across all electronic devices and systems. Their reliability is critical in circuits that transmit and receive information.”

The use of simulation to achieve low insertion loss and reliable circuit performance in a design, requires choosing accurate material properties such as relative dielectric constant and loss tangent, while also considering surface roughness effects in the computer model.
“As the frequency increases, maintaining the impedance become more complex, as small quirks arising from the geometry or selected materials can be magnified,” explains Bill Rosas, Cofounder of Signal Microwave. “Simulation allows us to ensure that these critical pieces of RF infrastructure are optimized for 5G communications.”

Designing components ready for 5G, IoT, automotive radars and satellite communications will require multiphysics modeling. Using COMSOL Multiphysics microwave and RF designers can couple electromagnetic simulations with heat transfer, structural mechanics, fluid flow, and other physical phenomena, allowing them to represent coupled physics effects as they would occur in the real world. That means being able to accurately investigate designs and fully benefit from the virtual prototyping capabilities multiphysics simulation offers.

COMSOL
www.comsol.com/rf-module

ASCENT unveils 2020 Autodesk Courseware roadmap

May 20, 2019 By wpengine Leave a Comment

In conjunction with the Autodesk 2020 software releases, ASCENT Center for Technical Knowledge has released its fundamental guides for the core software titles: AutoCAD, Civil 3D, Inventor and Revit. As an Autodesk Authorized Publisher, ASCENT has also published their 2020 Courseware Roadmap that includes over 60 titles planned for release throughout 2019.

“While our team is known for our off-the-shelf, comprehensive Autodesk courseware, we also see many design engineering firms request help creating custom documentation,” says Paul Burden, director of product development for ASCENT. “Users can quickly become productive when learning from blended content consisting of reference, video, and project elements that reflects their unique in-house workflows and processes. In addition, many of our Autodesk Training Center customers and Academic clients benefit from courseware assembled from our extensive library of learning modules. Using bespoke collections of our standard modules enables them to offer a roster of differentiated classes giving students unique learning experiences and varied course options.”

Autodesk 2020 Learning Guides Now Available from ASCENT:

ASCENT’s offerings include learning materials for students, instructors, professionals and individuals, designed for self-paced learning, instructor-led training, and on-the-job reference. Learning Guides include practice exercises and, in applicable guides, Autodesk Certification Objectives to help those preparing for Autodesk Professional Certification Exams. Instructor Guides contain the same instructional content as a Learning Guide, plus include answers to the chapter review questions, timing suggestions to help deliver the course, and instructor presentation files.

Maple 2019’s data analysis capabilities identify biomarkers of several cancers

April 12, 2019 By Leslie Langnau Leave a Comment

The ability to leverage complex data as a strategic asset is becoming increasingly critical, but the current labor market has a shortage of resources in big data analytics. Companies are faced with several challenges related to the inadequate resources necessary to process data. A long-time Maple user and quantum mechanics researcher, Marvin Weinstein, refers to the problem of extracting meaning from large data sets as, “How do we find a needle in a multi-dimensional haystack, when we don’t know what a needle is, and we don’t know if there is a needle in the haystack?”

Dynamic Quantum Clustering (DQC) accomplishes this feat by creating a density map of data using DQC’s proprietary Maple library, and Maple 2019 visualization tools. The result of a DQC analysis is a Maple animation that provides a visual record of the complex computations going on behind the scene. According to Marvin, Maple animations have been a big part of DQC’s success because they reveal answers without the complex mathematics. He says that, “these animations sell our product because they leverage the human ability to spot patterns developing in time and space.”

With Maple’s prototyping abilities and customizable features, Marvin was able to get DQC up and running within a week. Marvin confesses that “whenever I can avoid having to do things [manually], I do so.” By using the DQC compiled library within Maple, it was possible for Quantum Insights to have a powerful GUI without having to build the interface from scratch. Marvin believes that time is often wasted with unnecessary coding and analysis tasks, and exploits many of the built-in features of Maple to save time drive his research forward.

The core of DQC is an algorithm that maps a problem of unsupervised clustering to a problem in quantum mechanics. It uses quantum evolution to identify correlated information and reveals the details of the process through a Maple animation. This animation typically reveals hidden and unexpected insights into complex data. Marvin asserts that the aim of DQC is to “let the data speak for itself.” The advantage of working without making assumptions or hypotheses, without cleaning the data, and without the need for expert knowledge means that DQC is a data exploration method that is faster, cheaper and more efficient than current methods.

One of DQC’s major accomplishments thus far has been the identification of several biomarkers strongly correlated with multiple cancers. According to Marvin, TCGA analysis was selected as the initial step towards cancer research because cancer is a problem that everyone understands to be a big deal, and “we’ve all lost people we love to cancer.” The hope was that better clustering methods would allow mRNA from various tumor samples to better classify tumors into biologically relevant groups. The study identified 48 of 73,000 mRNA expressions that defined all five different cancer types. This analysis, published in Nature Scientific Reports, has demonstrated the ability to provide an accurate diagnosis of cancer type, based on molecular information alone, and has further revealed significant sub-typing of cancer cells, beyond what pathologists can currently achieve. The sensitivity to variation in mRNA expression patterns is the “holy grail” of precision medicine, because it promises to tell us which tumors are likely to respond to a drug and which tumors will not respond. Moreover, the analysis showed that DQC significantly outperformed tSNE-HDBScan, the current gold standard clustering method used in cancer data analytics.

Now, Marvin is working in pharmacogenomics to offer better diagnosis and treatment methods for cancer and other diseases. His company, Quantum Insights, is working towards developing effective, data-driven strategies. While Quantum Insight’s initial focus was cancer, the goal is to expand this research into other healthcare applications. Marvin believes that the DQC technique will help save lives wherever better analytics are required. Other successful applications of his research include Alzheimer’s data, detection of contraband nuclear material, analysis of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data, and other areas that utilize large amounts of data.

Maplesoft
www.maplesoft.com