What FEA are people using?

Hi,

What FEA programs are people using with SolidWorks?

I am thinking about "static stress" and "motion" simulation for add-ins to
SolidWorks (although I need not simulate my own stress, plenty already

Anyone using "3G.author" (or other products) from Plasso Tech?

Cost -vs- COSMOSxxxx?

Are the costs of these add-in program(s) similar (+ maintenance)? Again
stress & motion...

Any thoughts would be appreciated!

Aron

 

Recently benchmarked NEiWorks and NEiNASTRAN. Good SW interface, and
much more capable than COSMOS. Cost about US$10K.

They are progressing toward SW Gold Partner status, as well.
<http://www.noraneng.com>

 

An option for you since you mentioned only static stress might be SW
office premium upgrade (aren't they running a special on that now?
anyone?) and bundle Cosmos Motion with. I am unsure about cost and
maintenance on this

Ken M

 

I run NE Nastran with FEMAP for pre and post.
I have NEiWorks but it is not mature enough yet to do what I do.
I also run DesignStar and Cosmos/M.

I steer away from FEA embedding in CAD prefering a reasonable interface
and translation capability instread. Both FEAMAP and Designstar provide
that. There are two reasons. One is book keeping. The other reason is
performance.

When doing FEA the results are valid for only the geometry on which the
run was performed. If the FEA is in the CAD then as soon as you change
anything the FEA is invalid for that. So for book keeping I prefer to
export a parasolid or save an analysis document that won't change when
the geometry changes in CAD.

I typically run analyses that take hours on a high performance work
station. If the FEA was in the CAD I would be locked out and unable to
do other things. What I prefer is to run the FEA in the background at a
lower priority. I have run 60 hour jobs that way without really
impacting CAD performance.

DesignStar strikes a happy medium as far as design goes because it has
a link to the SW model that can be turned on and off to enable what if
when needed.

 

Good point about not getting too hooked on operating in CAD. One
should be concrned with results first.

I'm not a big fan of FEMAP, especially when compared to ANSYS
Workbench. Also, it took some time to convince the Noran guys that I
wasn't THAT interested in NEiWorks. Nice tool, but not a real selling
point to me. I needed good contact analysis, period. Geometry can
always be imported.

 

FEMAP out of the box is a bit clunky being older generation software. I
customize menus a bit and that can make it fly. Also it is nice to be
able to export to Cosmos/M, Nastran or whatever.

The nice thing about NEiWorks is that it writes out bulk data which can
be edited to change analysis type, loads, constraints, properties and a
whole bunch of fiddly things that analysts like to do. The down side is
no assembly support yet.

 

I use NENastran (Noran Engineering) & Femap. I have NEiWorks (Noran
Engineering) which ties nicely into Solidworks. However, it is still a few
cycles away from what I need. I do generally nonlinear and lots of contact
(gaps) type of analysis. However, given how well NENastran performs and how
committed the people at Noran are to their customers, I am confident that
NEiWorks will get where I need it to be. So for now I simply model in
SolidWorks, use Femap for pre/post processing and process in NENastran.

 

There is one thing people should know about Nastran in general. Nastran
doesn't do axisymmetric or 2D analysis. Yes they sort of have
axisymmetric, but it isn't really the fast 2D based variety. Not that
this matters anyway unless you are comparing with Ansys or Cosmos/M and
geostar. I mention it because sometimes 2D analysis is the only way to
go for some types of non-linear analysis.

 

any algor users?

 

We use COSMOSWorks here - it does just about all that we need to do.

WT

 

We use Algor FEMPRO, check into Algor INCAD for Solidworks at www.algor.com.