ADAMS/Durability

What's New

Auto-plugin capability

The new Plugin Manager that was added for the 2003 release impacts how ADAMS/Durability is loaded. The Plugin Manager allows you to select all of the plugins you want to load or unload at one time. You have the choice of loading plugins for just a single session or every time, automatically, at startup. The Plugin Manager is accessed from the Tools menu.

See the What's New for ADAMS/View or ADAMS/Car for additional details.

Quasi-static stress recovery

A useful new feature that has been added is quasi-static stress recovery of rigid bodies with solid geometry. You can now recover and postprocess stress on a component from an MSC.ADAMS simulation without needing to model it as a flexible body. You no longer have to rely on an external FEA program for recovering stresses on components.

Note: This new feature uses the ADAMS/AutoFlex mesher and solver and therefore requires an ADAMS/AutoFlex license.

Stress and life functions

The functions LIFE, MAX_STRESS, HOT_SPOTS, and TOP_SPOTS have been provided to allow quantitative measure and locations of maximum stress or strain, or minimum life on flexible bodies. Location and measure of maximum stress on rigid bodies with solid geometry can also be obtained. Furthermore, you will find these functions to be particularly useful in objective or response evaluations for optimization or DOE studies.

Hot spot report generation

A new option has been added for you to generate a table of hot spots for a flexible body or rigid body with stress recovery. Information such as location, time, and maximum value for each hot spot is included in the report. The report can be output in a tab-delimited text or HTML file format.

Contour probe

Exploring the numerical value of contours on a flexible body is much easier than before. You can now probe a contour value to obtain instant feedback of stress, strain, deformation, life or damage anywhere on the flexible body, at any time in a simulation. You can also probe rigid bodies with quasi-static stress recovery.

MSC.Fatigue interface

You can now export time histories of a system response on a flexible component to MSC.Fatigue for life or damage prediction. MSC.Fatigue results can also be postprocessed on the flexible part in MSC.ADAMS. This is similar to what is available from our existing interface for FE-Fatigue.

Improved stress/strain postprocessing of flexible components

We have improved performance of animation frame caching for flexible bodies. You will also see faster animation speeds when displaying the stress or strain contours without deforming flexible bodies (that is, using a zero scale factor). You will have interactive response when modifying contour limits and further control of the numerical formatting of the contour legend.

Improved plotting of DAC or RPC data in ADAMS/PostProcessor

We have improved the performance of plot generation and modifications for large amounts of data stored in DAC or RPC files.

For additional details see What's New for ADAMS/PostProcessor.

Standalone tool for processing durability output in ADAMS/Solver models with results

A tool called res2dur is available in the Durability Toolkit to process DACSAVE or RPCSAVE OUTPUT options, or FEMDATA statement from an ADAMS/Solver run. This tool is useful if any problems are encountered, such as lack of license or disk space, when processing this output after the simulation has finished.

Online help

When you load the ADAMS/Durability plugin, a new menu option labelled ADAMS/Durability Help, appears under Help. Also, selecting F1 in any of the ADAMS/Durability dialog boxes displays the online help for that feature.

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Changes

Stress modes support in I-DEAS

You can now include stress modes during generation of flexible bodies (MNFs) from I-DEAS beginning with version 10. With stress information now provided in the .mnf, I-DEAS users can take advantage of modal stress recovery and fatigue life prediction when using ADAMS/Durability.

Assist dialog box for INTERP function

An assist dialog box is now available for the INTERP function inside the ADAMS/View function builder.

Temporary results file for FEMDATA

A temporary results file is created for processing FEMDATA statements and requests for DACSAVE or RPCSAVE for ADAMS/Solver.

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Issues resolved

During the course of 2003 release development, many maintenance and support issues have been resolved. The list below illustrates some of the key issues that are resolved. Contact your local MSC.ADAMS support provider for determining the status of other specific issues.

Items resolved in the 12.0 Service Pack

The 2003 release of ADAMS/Durability includes all of the fixes that were provided in the 12.0 Service Pack. For reference, these items were:

28744
Previously, the FE-Fatigue results could not be displayed when running ADAMS/Durability in ADAMS/Car. If you tried to view damage contours, for example, after importing an FE-Fatigue Universal file, you would get the error message, "There is no Damage information for the flex bodies in the default view." This issue has been resolved and FE-Fatigue results can be displayed in ADAMS/Car.

31698
A progress meter has been added to show you the status while ADAMS/Durability is processing stress information.

Additional items resolved

20914
Warning messages are now issued by ADAMS/Solver when extrapolating beyond the time history contained in DAC or RPC III files.

29803
Corrected the problem on the IBM AIX platform where creating a spline by referencing an RPC file would cause a SPLINE_READ error in stand-alone ADAMS/Solver.

26970
Corrected the problems with RPC file truncation in simulations with non-constant time steps; a warning message will now be displayed. Note that non-constant time steps can be avoided by specifying INTERPOLATION=ON in the ADAMS/Solver INTEGRATOR statement or command. This causes ADAMS/Solver to hit the output step exactly without having to control its integration step size, and frequently improve simulation run times.

30379
Improved the error handling for conditions when file cannot be found for SPLINEs referenced by file. A warning is now issued.

31498
Corrected the problem that prevented RPC and DAC files from being created directly from curve data.

35843
Corrected the problem that caused an application crash when trying to display stress for simulations having only one output step (for example, SIM/STA).

35910
Corrected the problem that prevented a large RPC plot and animation from being on the same page in ADAMS/PostProcessor.

35947
Unlimited channel support for RPC III files; the 128-channel restriction has been removed.

36153
Corrected the problem that was causing incorrect file path for RPC files when using ADAMS/Car. Updated path lookup method to work better with special ADAMS/Car file protocols.

36255
DAC or RPC file output now supports ADAMS/Solver REQUESTs with the CNAME, CUNIT and/or RESULT_NAME keywords.

36374
Corrected the problem that caused ADAMS/Durability to erroneously transform modal coordinate time histories to the unorthonormalized basis. This error was happening when the FEA program was one that didn’t orthonormalize (for example, ANSYS and ABAQUS) and the DAC and FES files were being exported simultaneously.

36501
Corrected the problem that was causing FE-Fatigue results contours to appear gray on flexible bodies in ADAMS/Car.

36894
Corrected the problem that prevented the ADAMS/Durability plugin from loading into ADAMS/PostProcessor under certain circumstances.

37083
Updated the handling of extremely small numerical values of stress to prevent floating-point overflow errors.

37615
Corrected the problem that was preventing contour plots from being updated when switching components (flexible bodies) in ADAMS/PostProcessor.

38759, 38825
Improved error checking of FEMDATA statements when reading (or importing) ADAMS/Solver dataset (.adm) file.

38826
Corrected the problem of missing node numbers in the Modify FEMDATA dialog box.

38827
Reduced the memory requirements of processing FEMDATA statements or the DACSAVE or RPCSAVE OUTPUT options in ADAMS/Solver.

39249
All output steps are incorporated (including contacts) when computing or resetting stress or strain contour limits.

40389
Plotting of DAC or RPC file data now functions with time limits set.

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Known issues

Please go to the Knowledge Base to read all of the Known Issues for ADAMS/Durability 2003

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Revised: 09/06/05