Whatever industry you work in, producing the best products means mastering a range of design engineering domains. Ultimately, your company will need to unite these disciplines toward optimizing performance attributes against cost and product lifetime to deliver the best overall user experience. Every step in the development process is targeted toward answering the questions:
- Will this product work as intended?
- How long will it last?
- What will our customers think about it?
You will typically distill that down to a series of analyses that systematically reveal the best answers to each question in your area of focus, and then merge it with those answers obtained from your colleagues to get a complete picture.
How to Stay at the Top of Your Game
We get it. We’ve heard your concerns and are evolving to better meet your needs in today’s world to help you deliver tomorrow’s best products. At SIMULIA, we also have experts in our silos of knowledge, but we too must broaden our scope and increase our levels of integration to deliver the synergies you need to meet your goals.
We know it’s no longer sufficient to simply mesh a product model, deliver stress and deformation plots and then move on to another project. You are expected to do more, to take the next step and to extrapolate what you have learned to predict durability and lifespan or estimate the operating range for a given design or family of designs or even suggest alternate designs that will perform better or more reliably. Today, you need to provide more complete answers—and do it even sooner than ever before. And those who grow their skill sets to deliver these results will advance faster and grow the use of simulation in their organizations.
Access the Tools You Need
With these increasing demands, we see great opportunities for our customers. We have always been committed to providing technology to solve your toughest problems. You’ve noticed that we have been accumulating exceptional technology and knowledge from companies that were previously partners, but now as part of SIMULIA can help share their experience to improve your productivity. We are now busy assembling them into the most useful toolkit possible to address the “pain points” that affect performance, production and profitability.
Our software portfolio of leading products has indeed grown, now including Abaqus, Isight, Tosca, fe-safe, Simpoe-Mold and Simpack. Over time, these will all be available in an integrated environment on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform. But your challenges are today … so to help you begin to realize the potential of this portfolio of products, we have introduced a flexible way to gain access to many of them with a single license, what we call “Extended Tokens.” When you choose this licensing scheme, a single-token pool gives you full access to our core simulation group of product families: Abaqus, Isight, Tosca and fe-safe.
What ‘Power of the Portfolio’ Really Means for SIMULIA Customers
Using Extended Tokens, you no longer need to decide up front which of these technologies you will need and for how long. (For example, if you are using Abaqus 6.14, you also have access to Isight 5.9, Tosca Structure 8.1, Tosca Fluid 2.4, and fe-safe 6.5 for as much as your token pool will allow. Please see page 4 of this issue for details about the most recent releases of all these portfolio products.) This will allow you to use products you may be unfamiliar with and determine for yourself when and where they can help you. No need to go back and request software you didn’t know you needed originally. You can explore the tools that can help you work more efficiently, solve new problems while broadening your skill set and increase your value within the company.
So how does the use of the SIMULIA Portfolio help you do your job better? Here are just a few examples from the life sciences, aerospace and industrial equipment industries:
Making a Heart Stent More Durable
For a medical device that is being implanted into a human being, the critical question all stent manufacturers must answer is, “What is its fatigue life and how many years will it last in a living patient?”
SIMULIA recently addressed this question using the combination of Abaqus, Tosca, fe-safe and Isight on a generic stent design.
Abaqus identified areas of stress concentration. Tosca refined the geometry of the stent, showing where material could be removed to decrease stress in the most critical areas. fe-safe examined durability before and after the application of Tosca, revealing a significant increase in product life expectancy after the Tosca analysis. Isight carried out a design-space study that optimized stent design versus costs and helped us reach the best possible result with the bottom line in mind.
Quadcopter Flight Plan: From Concept to Airborne
Those of you who attended the 2014 SIMULIA Community Conference in Providence saw the Power of the Portfolio really take off—literally! From concept (how to get medical supplies to remote areas without roads), to design, to manufacturing, to a finished Quadcopter flying across the conference stage carrying a package, this demonstration brought it all home to the audience.
Collaborating with each other on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, the team of SIMULIA analysts used Abaqus/CAE, Abaqus/CFD, fe-safe, Tosca, Simpoe Mold, Isight and more to prove out a reliable, robust aerial vehicle.
Getting Down to Earth With Backhoe Design
Going from the skies to the ground, our final example is the excavator, which some of you may remember from one of the General Lectures at the SCC. This complex, hardworking piece of industrial equipment presented an ideal opportunity for highlighting the diverse capabilities of the SIMULIA Portfolio. CATIA Systems’ Dymola, Abaqus, XFEM, CEL and Tosca were all employed to answer various answers about the backhoe’s performance, durability and structural integrity—and reduce weight by 20%.
Bringing Home the Power of the Portfolio
I hope these examples help you visualize how you might be able to take full advantage of SIMULIA technologies. Whatever your current work description, we can help identify which tools will help you explore every challenge and arrive at solutions that are as complete as possible. In the complex world of design engineering, the appropriate solvers can spark discovery into the deepest levels of physical phenomena inherent in a vast variety of products.
We have seen the power of the SIMULIA Portfolio in action with our customers and know that as you grow your expertise to include more of our products, you will see the benefits yourself. So when it next comes time for your team to renew the SIMULIA products that you use, please think about trying the Power of the Portfolio through the Extended Token Program. You’ll easily experience how access to Abaqus, Isight, Tosca and fe-safe can expand your impact, enrich your professional capabilities and keep you current with all that software technology can provide. The job of the analyst is rapidly changing. We’re here to help make sure you have what you need to succeed.
