Editor’s Pick: Agile Engineering Design System v8.5

Dear DE Reader:

Well, it’s time for 2016 to blow outta here. If only a giant fan would help. Maybe today’s Pick of Week could help you design, analyze and manufacture one that could do it.

Interesting news came over the wires recently about version 8.5 of Concepts NREC’s Agile Engineering Design System, their integrated CAE and CAM suite for the entire turbomachinery design process. The CAE part of the suite provides toolsets for preliminary sizing, detailed and specialized design jobs, including 3D CFD (computational fluid dynamics) analyses, optimization, gas turbine cooling, rotor dynamics as well as FEA (finite element analyses) for stress and vibration.

The suite’s CAM tool kits offer a family of 5-axis milling tools and optional modules geared toward jobs like milling ruled-surface turbomachinery components, single-blade parts as well as other turbomachinery components such as impellers and rotors. Version 8.5 debuts a new optional module for 3-axis roughing that can be applied to impellers, blisks and shrouded wheels.

You can use each CAE and CAM module in the Agile Engineering Design System independently if you want. But a big part of the system’s power lies in the fact that each module integrates with its sibling modules. This not only ensures easy data transfers; it helps you optimize designs based on the impact to cost, machining time and performance.

And that dovetails with the 8.5 release. According to Concepts NREC, the main focus in this new version is that it’ll help you design and manufacture higher performing turbomachinery in less time. The key example of that is the new integration of the FINE/Turbo CFD tools from NUMECA International.

What this means is that you can take your designs created in Concepts NREC’s AxCent module for detailed 3D geometric design and rapid flow analysis of multistaged axial and radial turbomachinery and analyze them with the NUMECA tools. It’s said to be a “just push the button” affair. Your results may vary, but Concepts NERC says that the embedded NUMECA technology will deliver an order of magnitude speedup in CFD analyses as well as the ability to analyze unsteady flows and arbitrary geometry with unstructured meshes.

Version 8.5 of the Agile Engineering Design System sounds pretty neat. Hit today’s Pick of the Week write-up link to learn more about it. You could become a fan. Lots of people already are.

Thanks, Pal. Auld Lang Syne and all that. – Lockwood

Anthony J. Lockwood

Editor at Large, DE

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