MSC Apex Grizzly: Structural analysis for massive assemblies

Bruce Jenkins, Ora Research

MSC Software just announced MSC Apex Grizzly, the seventh release of its next-generation CAE platform and an unprecedented breakthrough in engineering modeling and simulation of mega-structures.

Very large structures such as cranes, ship hulls, shipyard ramps and the like are typically massive assemblies that often include thousands of parts welded together, and thus present unique challenges in finite element modeling, model validation and simulation. Due to the sheer number of parts, users have traditionally taken from weeks to months to build finite element models—where this was possible at all—and thus found it a struggle to have time to model and simulate more than a small handful of design iterations. As a result, engineers were often forced to rely on rougher, lower-fidelity approximation methods to evaluate these massive fabricated structures.

With its latest Apex release, Grizzly, MSC says it has at last delivered a solution that expedites modeling and validation tasks for such large-scale structures, and in an integrated and generative workflow for rapidly iterating on the design to validate stiffness, strength and stability of large assemblies. “With MSC Apex Grizzly,” said MSC Apex senior product manager Hugues Jeancolas, “we have seen our beta testers build and validate designs of thousands of parts in a day.”

Modeling productivity

Grizzly introduces Smart Suppress, a new geometry cleanup and defeaturing tool that can recognize and eliminate user-defined features. Designed to eliminate manual rework, it also lets users automate model preparation tasks. A new implementation of glue and tie connections speeds up assembly creation from hours to minutes, and lets users model large assemblies of parts using mesh-dependent connections while preserving the product structure. Grizzly also introduces cellular hex meshing to support multi-cut and multi-sweep meshing strategies.

Complete structural analysis

The new release expands on the application’s structural analysis capabilities with support for multi-events buckling analysis, allowing the user to manage multiple load cases. Grizzly also features new dynamics capabilities with integrated Fast Fourier Transform, letting users enter time dependent dynamic data. Finally, results processing has been enhanced with section and connection forces processing to support load path analysis.

Integrated and generative

Beyond modeling productivity and structural analysis completeness, with Grizzly, MSC Apex continues to build on its integrated and generative framework with new analysis readiness remedy tools and user experience for scenario setup, model validation and simulation execution, all of which facilitate incremental validation and rapid iteration of design alternatives.

New user experiences

Grizzly provides users a more optimized workflow by boosting their productivity with the newly introduced analysis readiness remedy, section view, enhanced tie connections, and macro recording for scripting. The new macro record/replay capability helps users develop Python scripts to automate geometry modeling, meshing and scenario setup tasks.

MSC Apex
http://www.mscsoftware.com/product/msc-apex