Bentley Systems Acquires FEA Software

Bentley Systems has acquired Massachusetts-based ADINA R & D Inc., a developer of finite element analysis (FEA) software applications. ADINA was founded in 1986 by Dr. Klaus-Jürgen Bathe, professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

According to the company, Bentley plans to apply the ADINA software to its ongoing infrastructure digital twin initiatives. Civil, structural, and mechanical engineers use ADINA software to analyze buildings, bridges, stadiums, pressure vessels, dams, and tunnels, including performing comprehensive safety and performance studies where reliability and resilience are of critical importance.

The ADINA software will be applied within digital twins of existing infrastructure assets, via the Bentley iTwin platform, to simulate their responses and vulnerabilities to stresses so extreme that nonlinear effects must be considered—caused (for instance) by seismic, wind, flood, pressure, thermal, collision, or blast forces, the company said.

Simulation of a pipe break in a nuclear reactor using ADINA technology. Image courtesy of Bentley Systems.

The ADINA System’s nonlinear simulation capabilities will be directly accessible, through technical and commercial integration, to users of Bentley Systems’ comprehensive modeling and simulation software portfolio for infrastructure engineering.

“Incorporating ADINA and its creators is very exciting for all of our engineering simulation teams, as it will also be for existing and new users,” said Raoul Karp, vice president, engineering simulation at Bentley Systems. “Dr. Bathe literally wrote the book on advancing finite element simulations, and the ADINA System provides the reference for benchmarking all other disparate analysis approaches. We will now be able to extend nonlinear realism across all of our infrastructure digital twin simulation offerings.”

Founder of ADINA Dr. K.J. Bathe, who will remain as a technical advisor, said, “My colleagues and I are proud to be joining Bentley Systems’ broad and deep simulation team. Our aim in the development of ADINA has always been to provide a most reliable and efficient analysis tool to scientists and engineers, and it is wonderful that with Bentley, ADINA will now be used and further developed with great potential for solving the varied and interrelated challenges of infrastructure resilience.”

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.