Simulia Abaqus 6.11
19 July 2011
Process type: Simulate
Previously, Al Dean looked at the brand new ATOM optimisation tools in Simulia’s Abaqus 6.11. This month five major highlights take the spotlight
| Product | Abaqus 6.11 |
|---|---|
| Company name | Simulia |
| Price | on application |
I couldn’t possibly hope to look at all of the hundreds of updates in this 6.11 release of the simulation software Abaqus, so I’ve chosen to concentrate on a few of the highlights.
New periodic media physics models allow the simulation of continuous process such as this steel rolling mill
These show how the system is advancing in several key areas and should give you some insight in where things are heading.
#1: Interactive mapping
This is an extension of the batch mapping capability that already exists. In short, the concept is that you take a field (temperature, density) from one study and map it onto another.
For example, you could take a heat transfer analysis and map it to a new set of geometry. The benefits are that you can take robust results from one complete study, quickly re-purpose those for use when studying a similar product’s performance and get some quick insight.
The process is uncoupled (so there’s no automatic updating) but you have the benefit that the process can work with quite dramatically differing datasets, meshes and geometry. A good use example is taking a pressure map from the surface of a vessel and mapping it into a static stress analysis.
#2: Expanding multiphysics
Multiphysics is perhaps the biggest challenge in today’s rapidly advancing world of simulation.
The Abaqus development team have been working hard to bring together previously disparate physics types over the last few years, culminating in the release of Abaqus’ own Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) solver in the last major release.
This allows users to combine both structural and fluid dynamics into co-simulation studies that take into account both aspects of a product’s performance. This work continues apace with this release.
In previous releases, it was perfectly possible to couple together thermal and structural studies, and electrical and thermal studies. It’s now possible to couple together all three.
An excellent example is the ability to accurately predict the behaviour of a complex process such as spot welding, which combines all three disciplines of study into a single task.
#3: Assembled fasteners
This is a fascinating one for those looking to push their simulation of assembled products to the next level.
Abaqus now allows the creation of a single simulation that shows how a fastener performs (such as bolts, rivets, spot welds etc), then allows you to replicate that performance across multiple instances.
This means that from a single, small scale study, you can integrate the failure properties of multiple instances of that fastener with ease.
Consider aerospace simulation, where critical components are often not the panels or structure, but the fasteners themselves - of which there could be 1,000s.
#4: New physics models
Abaqus 6.11 sees a couple of new types of physics models introduced into the system.
The first is support for Periodic Media. This is where you’re looking to simulate a continuous process (think, steel rolling mill), where steel is continually fed into the system. Abaqus links topologically identical meshed structures together forming a chain that is automatically moved from the outlet to the inlet.
The next is Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics. While this may sound complex, it is a method of simulating extreme deformation and fluid flow.
Typical examples include fluid mixing, ballistics and other highly complex things that are supremely difficult to simulate in general purpose simulation systems and generally require something more specialist (read: costly).
#5: Visualisation
While Abaqus has always had a full set of post-processing and results inspection tools, this release sees some work done on the visualisation of beam element-based studies. While beam element models afford a very efficient way of calculating the results of such structures, it doesn’t lend itself to easily comprehensible imagery for the sake of communication.
For some time, you’ve always been able to show a solid representation of each beam, accurately depicting the deformation of each beam - but couldn’t show the contours showing where deformation has occurred and where stress concentrations lie. Now you can gain greater insight into the performance of your product and document it more clearly.
Conclusion
There we go, a brief look at what’s also coming down the pipe from the Simulia team. While the other arms of Dassault Systèmes are spinning up V6 all across the board, I have to say that the Simulia team is doing some truly groundbreaking work to assist those simulating more and more complex products.
