Editor's Pick: Patran and MSC Fatigue Updated

By Anthony J. Lockwood

Dear Desktop Engineering Reader:

MSC Software has just announced the 2012 version of its Patran pre-/post-processing system as well as the 2012 edition of its durability/damage tolerance solver, MSC Fatigue. Any upgrade to Patran is, of course, news since it's probably the most widely deployed FEA pre-/post-processor. Both solutions will be available any minute now, and both releases offer several new tools worthy of your attention. Let's start with Patran.

Patran 2012 offers a slew of new tools, upgrades, and enhancements, some of which you knew were coming. For example, it now supports many new 1D, 2D, and 3D element formulations recently implemented in MSC Nastran and Marc. It also offers some interesting new nonlinear analysis capabilities such as a cohesive zone modeling technique that simulates delamination and virtual crack propagation for failure analysis. Think composite structure failure analysis and glued contact separation among other potential usages.

But the big news with Patran may just be the introduction of a new Model Browser Tree. Essentially, this is a customizable navigation and manipulation tool that gets you through menus quickly and provides easier access to parts of your model.

So, what we're really talking about here are productivity and greater access to data. And, from what I've seen, this means the "opening up" of Patran to more engineers since the Model Tree seems easy to use, learn, and master. Previous Patran patrons should like the expanded right-mouse click functionalities, one-click access to a bunch of task selections, and other usability enhancements designed to get you working on your project quickly. In a nutshell, what the Model Tree means is that you can get to entities faster, visualize them faster, and do what manipulations you need to more efficiently.

MSC Fatigue adds dedicated durability analysis capabilities to Patran, and it looks like version 2012 is an aggressive upgrade over previous editions. For one, MSC Fatigue 2012 has an upgraded nCode solver it leverages. Version 2012 also has a new virtual shaker table that predicts the fatigue life of components subjected to a single input random vibration load. And the MSC Fatigue 2012 Spot Weld toolset includes a new structural stress based Seam Weld module.

All in all, good stuff here. You can learn more about the 2012 releases of Patran and MSC Fatigue from today's Pick of the Week write-up. Make sure to hit the links to the Patran and MSC Fatigue web pages. When you do, a video pops up that will give you a pretty good summary of what these solutions can mean for you. Also make sure to go to the launch announcement for a brief but thorough tour of what's new in Patran and MSC Fatigue.

Thanks, pal. -- Lockwood

Anthony J. Lockwood
Editor at Large, Desktop Engineering

Read today’s Pick of the Week write-up.

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