Mesh improvements look to make analysis faster and more efficient.
IronCAD’s New Approach to Modeling and Design
Atlanta-based IronCAD has been building engineering tools since 2001 with a focus on CAD and product design. The user interface is unique, with a feel more like Blender or Sketchup than a traditional parametric CAD modeling tool. Users use shapes and handles to create parts quickly. The ‘unified design environment’ gives designers the ability to create a full assembly in one file, another foreign-sounding concept that looks fast and streamlined in video demonstrations.
Additional tools beyond the CAD design include IronCAD Compose, which allows designs from any major CAD software to be sent around a company for viewing, study, and discussion. A strong commitment to physics runs across all of the company’s offerings, from the SimWise Motion application to the Multiphysics for IronCAD tool. The 2021 Multiphysics update was recently announced with a focus on analysis improvements. The company hopes that these updates will allow customers to use the analysis tools earlier in the product development process.
Even though component and assembly design are reimagined with the IronCAD interface, the Multiphysics component will look much more familiar to designers with experience in Nastran or SOLIDWORKS Simulation. Basic stress, thermal, and electrostatic studies can be performed in the Multiphysics environment. An Advance package of the software lets users analyze nonlinear elastic, plastic, and foam materials. The Advance package also brings in large deformation and large rotation capabilities. Beyond this, the Advanced Dynamic application covers nonlinear buckling analysis and stress-stiffened modal analysis, and the Fluids package studies flow impacts.
2021 Multiphysics Changes Focus on Mesh, Computing Power
Tolerance assembly meshing brings parts of an assembly together to analyze as a unit. The new body is created by taking boundary surface facets and turning an assembly into one part, with the option to assign one material to the amalgam. This should be an improvement over the blanket Join command that many software use. The other issue this can solve is designed gaps for applications like welding, thermal expansion, or shrink control.
The new mesh silhouette display options show the united part’s new faces, edges, and vertices. This should create cleaner visuals with less pickable points for the user. The meeting zones will hold more edges and corners, an indicator for the user to review each interface between components.
Beyond the assembly capabilities announced with the IronCAD Multiphysics 2021 release, a new multi-thread meshing is introduced. The multi-thread meshing will take the analysis tasks and spread them among the computer’s computing cores. IronCAD says this improvement will lower the time spent building meshes and analyzing both complex geometry components and larger assemblies. Users of IronCAD Multiphysics can catch a preview version of these changes in the fourth quarter of 2021.
These changes look to be great improvements to the Multiphysics analysis package. As engineers, we are often taught that the interface between parts is the most important zone to design, but once the design is completed, that interface can cause problems. Allowing the user to customize the way that two mating components are treated in the physics engine and providing the ability to assign a single material for the assembly make this offering a big deal. This lets designers focus on a set of mating parts, solve the immediate issues with them, and then move on to their next priority.
