GE Infrastructure Technology has successfully deployed SimManager as part of a Simulation Data Management solution to several departments in GE Aviation. On a larger scale, there appear to be advantages to deploying it across the enterprise, which would include the GE Energy and GE Transportation businesses in this case. Clear benefits include cross business knowledge sharing, reduced infrastructure, and a more efficient support organization. However, there are also some substantial challenges when deploying beyond the department. This presentation explores the risks GE has identified and how we are quantifying them while developing a strategy to potentially deploy these tools to the enterprise. Specific topics are: export control; IP protection; data consolidation; data structure; and network, storage, and compute capacity.

Over the past decade the use of simulation has seen a dramatic increase. This increase is related to the burgeoning desire to leverage simulation in many ways including: reducing physical prototypes, reducing warranty risks/cost, creating more competitive products, and making smarter design decisions earlier. This increased usage comes both in the form of companies experienced with CAE and other simulation tools using simulation earlier and more often, as well as the spread of simulation into new companies and industries. This growth has not come without its issues in both technology and business culture. A great deal of attention has been given to tools for integration; however, there is an issue that to date has not received much attention. This is the issue of a significant difference between the expertise level required with current tools and the expertise level available. This presentation will explore the implications of this expertise chasm and the need / availability of a different approach to automation which spans the expertise chasm. This new approach to automation is referred to as intelligent automation. Intelligent automation is not a product, but is a philosophy and approach leveraging available technologies, which hopefully is the basis of the next generation of simulation products.

In the product development process a designer is often faced with the challenge of identifying an optimal design that meets performance requirements from various disciplines like NVH, durability, crash, cost, etc. Traditional optimization techniques often consider each discipline independently, which does not yield an optimal solution over all relevant disciplines. In order to account for multiple disciplines at once, it is necessary to capture a workflow involving multiple analysis tools and data transfer among these tools, while also satisfying performance requirements for all disciplines. Multidisciplinary optimization tools accelerate the search for higher performing and more robust design solutions within a given design space by automating design evaluations and using advanced mathematical search algorithms to locate optimal designs. In particular, the multidisciplinary optimization tool HEEDS has been shown to have a very efficient and robust optimization search algorithm, called SHERPA.

In this study, HEEDS was used in conjunction with Nastran to design a chassis frame with minimal mass and which satisfies all performance targets. A significant mass reduction was achieved.

You are camping overnight in bug infested woods. You can have a fly swatter or mosquito netting, but not both - which would you choose in order to sleep undisturbed? Through close collaboration for a mutual automotive customer, SFE and MSC were able to provide a much more modern, automated, and effective approach to pre-processing, analysis and post-processing loops, identifying both optimal and robust designs when compared to historical approaches. SFE CONCEPT, when paired with SimXpert, SimManager, and MD Nastran, enables a significantly improved, harmonized simulation process - one that can truly accelerate innovation and be institutionalized at companies for use on every program & every system without the traditional bottleneck resulting from over-dependence on more manual, iterative, time-intensive CAE analysis. Through the use of the latest software from SFE and MSC, together with design of experiments (DOE) techniques, large-scale geometry (including both shape and topology) changes can be realized so that engineers can obtain a better understanding and knowledge of their product's design space. This significantly increases product engineering knowledge in the early design phase enabling better design decisions and ultimately yielding more optimized and robust final designs. By using this approach, for instance, weight savings of 10-20% would not be unreasonable expectations. This presentation demonstrates how this new holistic simulation paradigm - leveraging the uniqueness of the rapid & automated shape and topology changes enabled by SFE CONCEPT, coupled with the multi-disciplinary analysis capabilities of MD Nastran and the process automation & simulation management capabilities of SimXpert and SimManager - truly enables game-changing multi-disciplinary optimization.

IBM Solutions for Engineering Analysis: Servers, Clusters, Scale Out File Services (SoFS), and Tivoli Security supporting MSC Software. Virtual Product Development (VPD) encompasses a wide variety of software tools that enable engineers to design and verify a product from concept through pre-production, all in the simulated realm. As pressures increase to reduce development expense, shorten development cycles, and increase product innovation and differentiation, the need for and value of VPD rapidly increases – especially the simulation and analysis component. Along with the benefits of VPD come a number of challenges our clients must face. As members of the industrial community globalize, data and security requirements must adapt to allow geo dispersed collaboration of design and engineering analysis data. Not only must members share this engineering analysis data in a coherent fashion, but also it must be securely accessed based on multiple roles and organizations. This session will focus on the IBM and MSC Software integrated solution with supporting architecture and proof points to help you realize your VPD objectives.

This presentation will provide an in depth example of real world integration projects between the domains of simulation and engineering. By using proven tools based on open ISO standards, dramatic results in time savings, accuracy, and other efficiencies will be achieved. Our example will show a joint project between MSC and PROSTEP for an automotive OEM for the integration of SimManager and the OEM’s PLM Environment. The first project phase of this project (the integration of SimManager with VPM) was successfully concluded in April. Lessons learned from this project and best practices will be provided to help with planning and performing future SimManager integration projects in a distributed and heterogeneous PLM environment.

FEA tools such as NASTRAN and SimXpert have traditionally been used to diagnose failures or to replace physical prototypes. The continual drive to innovate, shorten design cycles, and reduce costs is also causing these tools to be introduced earlier in the design process. The challenges of simulation driven design, however, stress FEA applications in new ways. Multiple alternatives must be compared and contrasted. Trade-offs must be understood. Optimized solutions must be found. To answer these types of questions multiple solver runs must be automated, solver inputs and results may need to be linked to other programs such as Excel and Matlab, and results must be mined to identify trends and best solutions. ModelCenter is a general purpose trade study environment that can automate virtually any simulation tool, including NASTRAN and SimXpert. This presentation will higlight how a simple plate structure can be optimized for strength and cost using ModelCenter, NASTRAN and Excel. A more complex example demonstrating usage of Design of Experiments with SimXpert will also be presented.

AcuSolve(TM) is a robust, fast and accurate, general purpose finite element flow solver that can be seamlessly used by engineers and scientists of all levels of expertise, either on a standalone basis or integrated into engineering and scientific applications. Aside from a growing and rich set of functionalities, AcuSolve also provides two powerful capabilities for solving complex multidisciplinary design problems involving coupled fluid flow and structural phenomena, Practical FSI (P-FSI) and Direct-Coupled FSI (DC-FSI), to predict linear solid/structural responses, and large deformation and non-linear solid/structural responses. We will give an overview on ACUSIM's FSI technology as well as present several FSI user examples and interoperabilities with MD-Nastran and OpenFSI.

Using Design-Of-Experiment (DOE) techniques has for a long time been a standard process in evaluating and tuning vehicle behavior. Pratt & Miller has extended the technique to also be used in correlating simulation models to test result. One general problem with this technique is that many different simulations are required to verify the model. This paper presents a method developed by Pratt & Miller that allows for optimization over multiple DOE's, with overlapping factors and partly overlapping objectives. The presentation describes the application of this method to correlating K&C (kinematic and compliance) testing to a front suspension for an upscale sedan. The experiments and tests involves parallel wheel travel, roll test and steering angle sweep and the factors to be optimized are the geometric hardpoints and bushing compliances.

MSC Software and Sun Microsystems have worked together for two decades to optimize MSC's major applications, including MD Nastran, on Sun Systems. This talk will outline the recent collaboration between MSC.Software and Sun to more tightly integrate Sun Grid Engine and MD Nastran. The presentation will include a discussion of a recent series of "how-to" blogs on this integration effort (posted on Sun's blogs.sun site). The "how-to" blogs lay out in a step-by-step format how to configure Sun Grid Engine to work effectively with MD Nastran. Making use of MD Nastran's existing job queueing interface capabilities as well as MSC's resource estimation tool (the "ESTIMATE" program) this presentation will give an overview of how to configure typical SGE job queues for MD Nastran, submit serial and parallel jobs, and how to manage resource utilization (memory, disk space, and license tokens) to get optimum throughputon a compute cluster. The talk will also cover some "best practice" performance guidelines for running MD Nastran on Sun hardware.

Whether it is beams, integrated panels or any other structural composite part, the many options for integrating design and analysis data in FiberSIM® provide a wide range of opportunities for optimization, process improvement and virtual testing. Through examples and scenarios, this presentation will show simple, effective ways to improve designs, increase confidence in analysis results and tailor tooling for composite parts.

Evolution of HPC technology in CAE space and its role in speeding product development are discussed in this presentation. The benefits of using HPC and Microsoft’s vision for HPC are also presented. Discussion includes details of Windows HPC SERVER 2008 architecture, ecosystem and proof points. Various ways to reduce TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) of HPC infrastructure will be discussed which will make HPC accessible to every simulation engineer and scientist.