Expand Virtual Product Development

By DE Editors

MSC.Software Corp.(Santa Ana, CA) has announced the availability of MSC.Fatigue 2005, which helpsengineersevaluate durability and damage tolerance of components and systems andmake changes early in the design cycle before prototypes are evercreated. This optimizes product durability, reduces product launchrisks, facilitates faster time-to-market, and reduces prototyping andtesting costs, says the company.

Mechanical systems that fail while in operation cause serious problemsfor all parties involved. Manufacturers are faced with high warrantycosts and liabilities, but more importantly, the safety of personsoperating faulty cars, trucks, aircraft, or machinery may be at risk.To reduce the risk that their products will fatigue prematurely orunexpectedly, manufacturers may over-design parts using much higherthan necessary margins of safety, which adds weight and cost, or relyheavily on physical fatigue tests to accurately predict failureconditions and life expectancy, which increases costs andtime-to-market.

As a key component in the Virtual Product Development (VPD) process anda member of the SimOffice family of products, MSC.Fatigue enablescustomers to quickly and qualitatively predict the effect of proposeddesign changes on product life. Used in conjunction with MSC’s broadsuite of VPD tools, MSC.Fatigue allows users to optimize their designsfor strength, weight, and shape.

Some of the new benefits and capabilities in MSC.Fatigue 2005:

Reduced simulation set-up time when using the Aerospace Load Spectrumcapability.

This enhanced capability provides an option to import datafrom an ASCII file for block creation.

Industrial strength simulations using the Large Model Translationcapability in FATTRANS

The translation of large models isperformed by using logic to break up the model in groups based onavailable memory. Intelligent messaging is available to guide the userto override the default memory allocation and specify custom memoryallocation.

Enhanced productivity using the new SIMMAX utility

SIMMAXextracts a time history from a series of DAC files or a single RPC filebased on two methods:

• Location of max peak, min valley, or abs max inthe control channel
  
• Scanning input channels for the single largestmaximum, minimum or absolute maximum and extracting for each channel,the simultaneousvalues of all other channels at the position of the largest event

This new capability takes into account the dominantinfluence of the flake-like shape of graphite in Gray Cast Iron on itsmechanical properties. The graphite flakes act as stress raisers,which may prematurely cause localized plastic flow at low stresses, andinitiate fracture in the matrix at higher stresses.

Enhanced Integration with MSC.Patran through full support of CWELD Spot WeldModeling capability

Simulation of realistic loading environments utilizing the RedesignDuty Cycle capability

The Redesign Duty Cycle takes advantage ofseveral capabilities including the ability to use load time historiesdirectly from the source directory, the ability to add or deletesequences, events and time histories, the ability to independentlyconfigure events and a reporting tool that provides users with damagestatistics from events and sequences.

Leverage diverse Operating System based computational resources on thenetwork and expect robust/faster simulations using Analysis Manager

Inthis new version, the Windows-Unix interaction limitation has beenremoved. Additionally, the input to Analysis Manager is handled withoutany user intervention.

MSC.Fatigue is developed in close cooperation with nCode,MSC.Software’s fatigue and durability partner.MSC.Fatigueis currently available under the MSC.MasterKey licensing System(formerly the VPD Campus Licensing System). The MSC.MasterKeysystem is tailored to the unique environment of every customer,maximizing productivity and engineering budgets by providing full-rangesimulation capabilities and flexible product management from atoken-based system.

For more information on MSC.Fatigue please visit the company’s Web site.