The word “innovation” brings with it the assumption of perpetual improvement—everything can always be made a bit better, faster. If you’re in product design and development, being innovative is just the way you are expected to work these days. Fortunately the use of simulation-enabled design is increasingly becoming the norm, firmly entrenched at the center of the more successful engineering and manufacturing-based businesses.
It’s not just those of us at Dassault Systèmes SIMULIA who are saying this: analysts at CIMdata, Gartner, and others are reporting this same trend. For example, in CIMdata’s recent Simulation & Analysis Market Analysis Report, it states that simulation “must be at the core of the infrastructure for enterprise product engineering platforms” to enable true, repeatable innovation and business decision-making in our hyper-competitive industry environment. (CIMdata 2016 Simulation & Analysis Market Analysis Report, July 2016, page 17 www.cimdata.com)
Yet the landscape is ever-changing in product design and development as new materials and technologies become commercially available. Just look at recent strides in advanced composites materials, and the intricacies of designing for industrial additive manufacturing (also known as 3D printing). This issue of SIMULIA Community News has several articles highlighting these technologies in action.
Composites are renowned for their ability to deliver both higher strength and lighter weight—yet they behave in very unique ways compared to metals like steel or aluminum. Simulating the design, manufacture and performance of complex composite materials is a unique challenge Dassault Systèmes is now addressing. There is a lot of progress on this topic. To highlight one point, strong interaction between CATIA and SIMULIA now allows composite designs and layouts defined in CATIA to be simulated immediately with the composites capability of Abaqus. See the article from Prof. Byron Pipes on p. 4.
Additive manufacturing (AM) also comes with its own unique universe of considerations—as well as exciting, previously unheard of design freedom. As acceptance of AM has grown (page 10), Dassault Systèmes has embarked on a long-term, dedicated effort to produce a virtual end-to-end solution that addresses all aspects of the AM process from design through manufacture. True to our science-founded methodology, this journey is driven at all levels by physics-based simulation that provides key insights into design and build decisions—including design optimization, build platform setup, material calibration, and process engineering.
The Power of the Portfolio broadens to simulation of advanced materials and manufacturing processes.
Simulation is key here because it offers a way to virtually engineer the multi-scale AM process to minimize unwanted effects like stress and distortion in 3D-printed parts. Our topology-optimization tools automatically generate designs for AM that the designer can consider and adapt. We’ve also worked with our sister brand CATIA to develop advanced capabilities in that portfolio specifically geared towards translating those designs into the types of CAD data files required for 3D printing. These tools are available now, both standalone and on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform.
Of course, no matter how a product is manufactured, understanding the material(s) from which it’s made is clearly fundamental. With the recent addition of BIOVIA to the Dassault Systèmes family, we are working on developing simulation of material behavior on the atomic, molecular, and eventually part and full-product level. Not only will this enable you to understand very detailed phase-transformation effects and fatigue responses in AM, it will help inform the way you build models for advanced materials such as composites—and for many other applications for which it’s desirable to design and/or select materials with customized end-performance as the goal.
And just like you, we never stop innovating. So we’re not sitting on our successes: we’re continuing to broaden our portfolio of offerings to give you even more tools to improve your mastery over product development and maximize your productivity. We’ve now got Simpack for modeling whole systems, Simpoe for moldmaking and, most recently, CST for electromagnetism, xFlow for CFD and wave6 for vibro-acoustics.
Add to these the huge potential of molecular-level simulation capabilities in BIOVIA discussed previously, and the power of the connected technology to enable end-to-end solution of customer workflows and design processes on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform becomes apparent. I hope you enjoy reading about these trends in this edition of SCN!
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