FEA – Ansys DesignSpace V17.0
Nova have recently upgraded our ANSYS Finite Element Analysis software package to ANSYS V17.0, the latest release of the engineering simulation technology suite, designed to optimise product development processes. This ensures our FEA and engineering design team keep the latest tools at their disposal, in order to provide a reliable, high quality service.
Built on a platform that accurately streamlines workflow among simulation applications, ANSYS 17.0 delivers critical multi-physics solutions, enhancements to pre-processing and meshing capabilities as well as a new parametric high performance computing (HPC) licensing model to make design exploration more scalable.”
As part of our in-house engineering design consultancy, we offer Finite Element Analysis as part of our design service. We use ANSYS DesignSpace to carry out our FEA work and it forms a crucial part of many of our client’s projects. In modern times we feel that the growing importance of FEA cannot be understated.
The importance behind FEA lies in its ability to perform tests on a concept before it is made real, reducing the time and cost needed to foster product innovations. This can save you thousands of pounds in design and manufacturing stages, by using FEA tests as the design stage progresses. ANSYS DesignSpace allows us to perform a number of real world simulations such as thermal, structural, weight optimisation and more.
Taken from ansys.com:
ANSYS DesignSpace software is an easy-to-use simulation package that provides designers with tools to conceptualise, design and validate their ideas right on the desktop. ANSYS DesignSpace software, a subset of the ANSYS Professional product, enables real-world, static structural and thermal, dynamic, weight optimisation, vibration mode, and safety factor simulations to be performed on designs without the need for advanced analysis knowledge.
Existing native CAD geometry can be used directly with ANSYS structural analysis software — with no translation, no IGES and no intermediate geometry formats. ANSYS has provided native bidirectional integration with the most popular CAD systems for more than a decade. Integration directly into the CAD menu bar makes it very simple to launch world-class simulation directly from a CAD system.
Since the ANSYS geometry import mechanism is common to all CAD systems, the user has the flexibility to work within a single common simulation environment while using multiple CAD packages.
Once the geometry has been imported, ANSYS structural software tools automatically detect and perform setup for contacts or joints between parts of an assembly. The contact settings and options can be modified, and additional manual contact definitions can be added. Joints for flexible/rigid dynamics are automatically detected. Each contact or joint is easily identified using the graphical tools provided in the environment.
ANSYS structural analysis software offers a large library of out-of-the box equation solvers. The library contains the sparse direct solver, preconditioned conjugate gradient (PCG) iterative solver, Jacobi conjugate gradient (JCG) solution and more. In addition, the distributed versions of PCG, JCG, and sparse solvers are available for use in large-scale computing via parallel processing. By combining our parallel algorithms with the power of GPUs, you can further reduce the solution time required for large models.
Variational technology from ANSYS allows accelerating computation of normal modes for cyclic structures, especially when a large number of harmonic indexes are required. Frequency sweeps such as those found in harmonic analyses benefit from variational technology as well. Typical speedup factors range from three to 10 times. Transient thermal runs and certain classes of nonlinear structural transient problems are computed in a shorter time using these same principles.
ANSYS FEA software provides a comprehensive set of post-processing tools to display results on models as contours or vector plots to provide summaries of the results (like min/max values and locations). Powerful and intuitive slicing techniques allow the user to get more detailed results over given parts of geometries. All results can be exported as text data or to a spreadsheet for further calculations. Animations are provided for static cases as well as for nonlinear or transient histories. Any result or boundary condition can be used to create customised charts.
“ANSYS 17.0 provides a great number of new and advanced features that bolster product performance and integrity through deeper design insight. The many new features in ANSYS 17.0, combined with ANSYS Workbench, deliver additional physics depth and breadth that can be scaled to meet the changing needs of customers.
The latest release from ANSYS supports our existing mechanical design software packages including AutoCAD, Inventor, Creo, Inventor, Unigraphics NX, Solid Edge, SolidWorks, Mechanical Desktop and Catia.