The Spatial InterOp, Parasolid based translators, have been updated to the R20 SP 1 revision. This gives CAD access support based on the table in Supported CAD Access, 8. MSC makes periodic updates to CAD access and are available through download patches at:

http://www.mscsoftware.com/support/software_updates/#patran

Note that MSC has converted to the new Connect API version of the Spatial InterOp translators.

Parasolid import now supports up to version 20. The Patran Parasolid kernel is based on Parasolid 19.

Support for Catia V5 R19 is available through the Parasolid import method using the Spatial InterOp translators.

Support for NX 5 is available on most platforms and NX 6 on Windows is now available.

Support for CAD import of Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 4.0 is available in this release.

The following enhancements are provided for support of implicit nonlinear analysis.

See Implicit Nonlinear (MD Nastran SOL 400), 2 and Customer Requests, 31

Patran 2010.2 has a new direct results access (DRA) capability which supports MD Nastran SOL 400 and which included several results access upgrades. This includes support for:

Patran 2010.2 also has enhancements to the Marc preference. Marc 2010 added 2 new solvers, MUMPS and PARDISO. Both of these support the Domain Decomposition Method (DDM). Patran 2010.2 has added support so you can choose one of these solvers for your Marc run. In addition the Job Parameters - Solvers/Options - Solver Type menu (on the Marc preference - Analysis form) now has the Pardiso Direct Sparse, and MUMPS Parallel Direct solver options.

The second enhancement to the Marc preference was to resolve defects that prevented you from successfully preprocessing 2D adaptive mesh models. Patran already supported post-processing of 2D and 3D adapted mesh .t16 files, so this now completes the capabilities required to use Patran to pre and post process 2D adaptive mesh models.

The ability to set the current working directory was added in this release. See section Set Current Working Directory, 6 for details.

The capability to change the Patran graphical user interface (GUI) skin on the Windows platforms is available in this release. Details can be found in section New GUI Skins, 9.

A production version of Patran for Windows and Linux 64 bit machines is available in this release. The 32 bit version of Patran can still be run on 64 bit machines. Some details of the 64 bit port are listed in Native 64 Bit Port, 16.

Publish, and retrieve Patran databases and related analysis files through the SimManager R4 client/server access. This functionality is now available on Window and Linux. See SimManager 2010 Integration (Linux/Windows), 19 for details.

The Patran 2010 context sensitive help is now available from MSCSoftware.com. See Patran Help on the Web, 21 for details.

Please review the Utilities/ What is New menu to see additions/updates made to the utilities.

The hybrid surface mesher is now generally available in addition to the isosurface and paver meshers for meshing surfaces and 2D geometry.

When working with large models, Patran’s performance will often suffer because because Patran uses disk swapping when there is not enough RAM available. The amount of RAM Patran will use before swapping is set by the PDB_C_CACHE_SIZE environment variable (see Patran Environment Variables (p. 52) in the Patran Installation and Operations Guide for more information). Previously Patran would only recognize this variable if it was manually set to a specific number (previous default was 784 MB). Patran 2010.2 (first introduced in 2010.1.2) has a new feature that automatically sets PDB_C_CACHE_SIZE to 75% of available ram (e.g. new default is auto75). Setting PDB_C_CACHE_SIZE to autoNN (where 9 < NN < 100) will cause Patran to automatically set PDB_C_CACHE_SIZE to NN percent of the available physical memory. This will resolve performance problems many Patran 2010 users have had when dealing with large models.

The Patran 2010.2 release introduces a new logo into the lower left corner of the graphics screen. This logo can be changed by the following PCL command: cycle_logo( ) - this command will change to a different logo, cycling through 3 available MSC logos. The logo setting does not persist with the Patran database, but users can control the logo setting on start-up using the above command together with the p3_epilog.pcl file.

The Patran 2010.2 release will be used as the basis for a new MSC Student Edition that will be released as MD Nastran Student Edition. For more information please see, MD Nastran Student Edition, 30.