Siemens promises changes for automotive, aerospace and industrial machinery.
Siemens Digital Industries Software recently announced Simcenter Mechanical 2212, the latest release of its flagship CAE software. In a detailed blog and video, Patrick Farrell, Siemens Senior Marketing Manager, outlined many of the changes coming.
Simcenter Mechanical represents a huge branch of software tools. Simcenter 3D and Simcenter Nastran are the biggest products, but other offerings under the umbrella include Simcenter Tire, Simcenter MAGNET, Simcenter Motorsolve and more. One change coming with this release is that it will align the release schedule for all of these tools, therefore impacting all future updates. This is a smart move that will save the division from rolling out several releases over the course of each year. It will also save IT professionals a significant amount of time by combining several installations into one update.
Since this release will now affect multiple tools, it’s no wonder that Simcenter Mechanical 2212 includes a wide variety of updates. The sectors seeing the biggest impacts deal with automotive, aerospace and machine design.
Automotive Updates for A Changing Marketplace
The automotive improvement that stands out is the new contact pattern display, which helps engineers model windshield wipers by setting a consistent force against the glass for the wipers’ full range of motion. Modeling the wiper as a flexible body and using contact elements will now yield a visual contact plot, force distribution plot and animation. Farrell is quick to point out that the contact patterns here are directly related to windshield wipers, but any application with multiple contact points can benefit from the tool.
Engineers working on electric vehicles are also going to see different workflows in this release. Shifting to electrification means redistributing the traditional internal combustion vehicle design responsibilities—with big changes happening in the powertrain and motor design departments. To address this shift, the release includes a template-based electric motor design and simulation tool. Using templates to optimize the two-dimensional properties of e-motors can show engineers the results of hundreds of different configurations, and help them find the right fit for their applications. The full design of the e-motor can then be completed, with additional features added for transmission and acoustic simulations.
Aerospace Gets New Features, Too
Getting aerospace results faster is one metric that Simcenter Mechanical seemed to focus on for the 2212 release. On the aircraft and rocket frame side, templates are included to speed up the calculation of stress analysis factors for safety. This functionality has been available in limited release for the last year or so, but 2212 represents its full reveal. The tool can automatically pre-fill a geometry based on the inputs, stress requirements and safety factors; the engineer simply chooses which geometries will display the safety data. Communicating the data to the rest of an engineering team is also easier, saving time by making sure that engineers aren’t needlessly duplicating the work of others.
Engineers who need to simulate stiffness behavior also win big with this release. Elements in tension are analyzed with membrane stiffness, while elements in compression use shear stiffness. Different load case models are needed for each condition, and duplicating these nearly identical models is a big time-sink. The new feature introduced to Simcenter Nastran is a tension-only quad element that can shift from membrane behavior to shear behavior. Estimates from Siemens say that using these tension-only elements to shift to one model, instead of multiple models, can save up to 80 percent of stiffness processing time. This is a huge jump, and I’m very interested to see this in practice.
Don’t Forget Industrial Machinery
Engineers working to design industrial machinery will have new tools to help them understand durability. The FKM guidelines used to calculate strength and durability can be computation-heavy and hard to follow. Last year, the FKM Wizard was released to help machine designers automate these calculations to get better results faster.
What has changed in the 2212 release is that Simcenter 3D can now automatically pull data from stress analysis results to perform durability computations that are adherent to the FKM guidelines. As a result, engineers can have a higher degree of confidence in the overall results without waiting for physical tests or outsourced studies.
What Does It All Mean?
The promotional video for this new release is full of great information for a variety of audiences. The beginning frames ask straightforward engineering questions, such as “will it break?” and “is it safe?” This is a smart approach, because these are manager-type questions and managers are often the ones making the decision to upgrade to a new software release. Companies are wondering when to spend the money and shift to high-performance computing, or when to invest in a graphics processor server, or creating a plan for how much of their work to do in the cloud vs on-premises. These are the big-money questions, but there’s still a cost associated with moving to a new release. Software needs to be updated, users need to be trained and documentation needs to be reviewed to find every mention of the old software version. The engineers and managers in charge of spending the money need to be aware of the bumps that a new software release will introduce.
There are a lot of upgrades in this new release that change how data is shared and moved. This seems like a small difference, but careful control of data from the input phase to the results phase can lead to huge gains in time and fidelity of results. One of the benefits of engineers using multiple Simcenter Mechanical tools is having the ability to take the same data sets and inputs and run with them from the global full assembly level down to the component level. Time is the immediate savings, but that translates into having the opportunity to test more designs and configurations to optimize a study.