Munich, March 27, 2019 — SimScale announces the upgrade of their solver for both structural and thermo-structural analyses to bring increased speed and robustness across all FEM-based simulation types available on the cloud-based CAE platform.
Following the release of a completely reworked Workbench in December last year along with multiple feature releases for computational fluid dynamics (CFD), the cloud simulation provider now brings FEA to focus by releasing automatic contact detection, improved robustness of the PETSC solver, and reduced memory requirements for MUMPS.
Introducing Automatic Contact Detection for FEA
While finite element analyses on CAD assemblies have been possible with SimScale before, a better way of properly constraining a model is a requirement that has been requested by many users. Moving away from manually having to define contacts, the online simulation platform can now automatically detect contacts between parts of an assembly, saving time and improving the user’s experience. The feature is already available and can be used for all finite element analysis types—static, dynamic, heat transfer, thermomechanical, and frequency analysis.
Automatic contact detection will be triggered automatically whenever a new multi-part geometry is assigned to a simulation. By default, all contacts in the assembly will always be created as Bonded contacts, and can then be edited by the user. The possibility of manually triggering contact detection is also available. Once completed, all detected contacts are grouped in order to create a constrained system. In addition, a newly added feature makes it now possible to convert one or multiple contacts into a physical/nonlinear contact.
All of the details regarding this new feature can be found in this article.
Improved Performance and Scalability
A significant performance improvement of up to 40%, as well as better scalability of the main system solvers (MUMPS, PETSC and MultFront), has also recently been reached.
“With the new version of the FEA solver, it is now possible to successfully use PETSC for highly nonlinear analyses involving contact and nonlinear materials. The memory requirements of the MUMPS solver have been significantly reduced (up to 50% in some cases), which enables running larger CAD models,” said Alex Fischer, Product VP at SimScale.
Apart from new features being released monthly, an improvement of user experience with the cloud-based simulation platform is now in full swing at SimScale, following the company’s mission of making computer-aided engineering not only accessible but also as easy to use as possible.
More details about SimScale’s features for finite element analysis can be found on their dedicated FEA page.
About SimScale:
SimScale is the world’s first production-ready SaaS application for engineering simulation. By providing instant access to computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and finite element analysis (FEA), SimScale has moved high-fidelity physics simulation technology from a complex and cost-prohibitive desktop application only available to experts in large companies to a user-friendly web application accessible to any designer and engineer in the world via a pay-as-you-go pricing model.
Founded in 2012 and based in Munich and Boston, SimScale is an integral part of the design validation process for thousands of successful companies worldwide and over 150,000 individual users across multiple industries, from AEC and HVAC to electronics, consumer goods, automotive and aerospace.
For more information, visit www.simscale.com/.
