solidThinking Releases Inspire 9.0

By DE Editors

solidThinking announced the release of  Inspire 9.0, the latest version of its simulation-driven product development software. "It's never been easier to address structural challenges at  the conceptual phase of a design project," said Andrew Bartels, program manager for solidThinking Inspire. "By employing the new capabilities introduced in this release, users can rapidly generate design spaces and arrive at efficient design concepts while improving both static and dynamic stiffness and reducing weight."
 
New features include:
 
Sketching tools: Users can build simple design spaces by modifying or creating new solid parts using line, rectangle, circle and arc sketching tools. In addition, geometric relationships, such as tangents, perpendicular and collinear, can be applied to sketches. When sketches are modified, constraints ensure the intended relationship between the sketch and entity. The sketched solid geometry can be exported from Inspire in various formats including Parasolid, Step and IGES.

Boolean operations: New solid objects can be created by performing Boolean operations to combine, subtract or intersect sets of objects.

Maximum thickness control: Users can control wall thickness and the diameters of beam-like structures in a generated shape by specifying a minimum and/or maximum thickness.

View controls: In one click, users can switch between perspective and orthogonal views to enable more precise sketching. Models also can be aligned to the closest principal axis when oriented arbitrarily.

Altair HyperWorks integration: Files generated by Inspire can be exported to HyperMesh for validation and advanced structural analyses.

64-bit Support: A 64-bit executable is available for Windows 7, Vista and XP.

For more information, visit solidThinking.
 
Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company's website.