Advanced CAE Companies Coreform and Corvid Partner

What does it mean that Cubit is the preferred preprocessor for Velodyne?

The History of Corvid Technologies and Coreform

Corvid Technologies, founded in 2004, is a technology company that frames itself as a small business with big contracts in the defense, motorsports and biological systems industries. Engineers and designers work from a variety of different home bases to offer design, development, testing and building services. Velodyne is Corvid’s multi-physics solver and its development began as part of a Missile Defense Agency project studying interceptor effectiveness and post-intercept debris fields.

Cubit streamlines model prep and mesh generation. (Image courtesy of Coreform and Sandia National Laboratories.)

Cubit streamlines model prep and mesh generation. (Image courtesy of Coreform and Sandia National Laboratories.)

Coreform is a computer-aided engineering company with a vision to “radically improve the product development process through more accurate and integrated simulation technology.” Coreform IGA is the firm’s isogeometric structural solver that works to improve a model’s meshing and lower processing time while maintaining accuracy levels. Cubit is Coreform’s preprocessing tool, which is built to reduce the amount of time that engineers and programmers need to prepare finite element analysis (FEA) and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models. Programmers at Sandia National Labs developed the software and released it commercially in 2006 as Trelis. Coreform signed an agreement with Sandia in 2020 to be the software’s exclusive distributor and renamed it Cubit.

These two companies recently announced a partnership where Cubit will be the preferred preprocessor for Velodyne, which previously used Cubit on several projects, especially in the ballistics field.

“In the last couple of years, Coreform has proven their commitment to continuing to improve Cubit, which is very valuable to us as we improve our own product,” said David Robinson, CEO of Corvid. “Now we are excited to offer the combination of Velodyne and Coreform Cubit to our customers.”

Corvid and Velodyne Aim to Push the Limits of HPC

Velodyne is the company’s flagship product designed for high strain rate, large material deformation events. Relating these specific applications to the defense industry, the software focuses on target penetration and blast loading. After the software proved to be an effective tool for studying missiles and missile damage, the company looked to expand its use and moved into tactical and combat vehicles. The survivability of personnel in the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected family of vehicles was studied to understand the conditions and impact of a vehicle affected by an improvised explosive device (IED) or landmine. Several other applications related to lightweight ballistic protection, insensitive munitions and post-impact debris have also been studied.

Mach number contour produced using Velodyne: Heat Transfer Model solution. (Image courtesy of Corvid.)

Mach number contour produced using Velodyne: Heat Transfer Model solution. (Image courtesy of Corvid.)

Recent years have seen Velodyne shift to studying test data. Depending on the application, a wide variety of nontraditional FEA tools can be used, including Smoothed particle hydrodynamics, coupled Lagrangian-Eulerian studies, and reaction kinetics of energetic materials. Each of these highly specialized studies requires the simulations to be more and more focused on exactly what the customer is looking for and producing the right results. Using a preprocessor tool that can spotlight the concerning areas while simplifying the rest can be a huge help to the simulations.

Raven is Corvid’s CFD solver, which is designed for steady-state applications in multidimensioned flows. The company works hard ensuring the fidelity of Raven, with confirmation studies existing for Mach numbers from 0.1 to 15. The software uses Euler equations for nonviscous flows and Navier-Stokes equations for laminar or turbulent flows.

Corvid technology has been shown to be useful to a variety of industries, including AI, batteries, 3D printing, instrumentation, surfacing and virtual reality. All are areas where the company has performed successful tests or simulations.

Coreform’s Success at Manipulating the Mesh

Coreform pushes three main products on its website: Coreform IGA, Cubit and Lattice GC. Lattice GC is integrated into Cubit and builds specialized lattices for 3D printing applications. Four lattice types are available, but the software also allows users to build a custom configuration. Lattices are built using the Cubit software’s hex meshing system and can export to “.cli” format.

Coreform IGA uses isogeometric analysis to determine the best way to build the mesh structure for a particular part. The aim is to reduce the number of elements and save time while improving simulation accuracy. The software is built around u-splines, a proprietary system of creating splines described by variables h (element size), p (polynomial degree) and k (smoothness). The u-splines were developed by Coreform and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Brigham Young University, and a copy of the introductory paper is available on the Coreform website. With this process, dense math and processing through the Bernstein-Bézier method lead to splines that are both simplified and descriptive.

Cubit is the company’s largest product line, with mesh control tools that give users an array of GUI-controlled options and the ability to create new mesh control. Standard functions like model cleanup help to find areas that will interfere with the hex mesh creation, and each element can be checked for quality. Quad, tri, tet, hex and wedge elements can be analyzed for aspect ratio, area and volume, min/max angle, distortion and maximum timestep. Elements can be controlled according to size and density. Equipotential, condition-number optimized, length-weighted, smart Laplacian and Winslow elliptic smoothing algorithms can be applied to meshes.

Everything that a user customizes in a GUI is kept in a journal file. Heavy-duty customizers can use the software development kit to build their own workflows with Python or C++. Even though these advanced options are built for the super-users, the company notes that it is strongly committed to Coreform customers of all levels. There’s an extensive set of tutorials that teach new users how to navigate the software, and forums are available for those who could benefit from the help of others who may have experienced the same issue. A commitment to students and trial users is evident in Coreform Cubit Learn, the free version of the software for education and hobby use, with a mesh export limit of 50,000 elements.

What Can Coreform and Corvid Do Together?

It’s important to understand that both Cubit and Velodyne are high-level tools. These aren’t the software applications that students learn as a successor to a computer-aided engineering course, or as extra substance for an FEA elective. The best way to use a preprocessor is to really understand your exact application needs and precisely how you’re not able to get that done in the native solver. This requires the user to understand the full finite element process and a heavy dose of programming couldn’t hurt, either.

This announcement that Velodyne will specify Cubit as its preprocessor of choice can help both software companies in the long run. Velodyne can now build models as true to its applications as possible, with the  ability to magnify the affected areas and zoom out on the noncritical zones of a study. Cubit can work to add more customization into its software for specific Velodyne applications, knowing that if new features are discovered that all its customers and marketing materials can benefit. The companies both have a good working knowledge of military and government standards and have worked together in the past. Each company also has demonstrated a history of continuous innovation over the last half-decade, continually adding new features into the software and moving adeptly between industries. Over the last few years, announcements like this have occasionally been precursors to one of the companies acquiring the other, but both companies here seem to be solidly established and enjoying growth periods.