We are back with another blog for Simcenter 3D and Simcenter Nastran. Soon January has already blown past us, but just before many of us were sending our last email before the holidays, version 2512 of Simcenter 3D and Nastran were released. In this post we will summarise some of the major updates and give you clues of how they can impact your workflows.
We will have a look at the following new features in Simcenter 3D and Simcenter Nastran:
- Selection Recipes: Creating selection recipes using object groups or “Persistent geometry tagging” as Siemens calls it.
- Selection Recipes: Boolean operations using selection recipes – Finally!
- Selection Recipes: support for both bolted connections and Mesh Mating Conditions.
- Adaptation of AMD BLAS libraries yielding 15-50 % better performance!
- Reassigning meshes to new collectors.
Plus, some honourable mentions at the end. Let’s dive into it!
Persistent Geometry Tagging
This has everything to do with building robust FE models for our Design Exploration (click to read our previous blogpost) and automated workflows. By using the geometry grouping capabilities already on CAD level we can track features all the way to the .fem and .sim files and in these use the attributed geometry in Selection Recipes which in turn can be used as definitions for Mesh Controls, bolted connections, or Result Probes to name a few.
The idea is to select a specific geometric entity on the .prt level, be it boss faces, or faces of a certain feature e.g. a couple of blend features and the associated faces. These can then be grouped, named, and attributed. Just as in previous versions this attribute can be catched in a Selection Recipe filter (this was made a lot easier with Automatic Selection Recipes in version 2506). Having the recipes defined in the model will enable an array of new entities to be defined, be it boundary conditions, contacts or meshes to give some examples. What’s more is that these groups will be updated if the features are altered afterwards and new entities can also be added. Such updates will update the group in the CAD, but it will also trigger the Selection Recipes to update. Resulting in a robust up-to-date FEM. Look at the video below to get an idea:
Boolean Operations on Selection Recipes
In this update there is somewhat of a Selection Recipe bonanza and boolean operations add yet another capability to these. In previous versions you could use boolean operations on groups defined in the .fem and .sim files. Now, the turn has come to Selection Recipes which adds the benefit of having selectable sets of entities which will update with geometry and mesh changes in comparison to groups in the .fem and .sim.
The union, subtraction, intersection and exclusive OR operations are supported so that you can define even more complex filters via your Selection Recipes.
Bolt Connection and Mesh Mating Conditions Support of Selection Recipes
Last of the Selection Recipe feature updates comes support for both the Bolt Connection and the Mesh Mating Condition commands. This means more automated bolt connections being enabled and more robust ways of defining mesh matings between select bodies.
Note that just as in the video the Mesh Mating Condition definition must be made using the automatic approach and that this will expand the selection to include all overlapping faces between the bodies in question.
AMD BLAS Adaptation – Simulation Speedup for AMD CPUs
Simcenter Nastran would be little without CPU’s crunching numbers to get your simulations to converge. To accomplish this efficiently Nastran utilises Basic Linear Algebra Subroutines. In previous versions both AMD and Intel CPUs would use the Intel MKL library for these operations. Now Nastran have been adapted to use the AMD AOCL-BLIS library for AMD CPUs which results in speedups of between 10-30 % reported by Siemens in conjunction with solver improvements made in the same version. See the excerpt below from AMD’s site.
Reorganising Model Meshes
For those of you who either like to mesh your models first and think of properties second, or for those of you who have too many bodies in each .fem to remember which goes where, this is an update for you. A new Reorganize Meshes command has been added to the Mesh group in the .fem file. This way you can add existing meshes to a completely new Mesh Collector, sort them according to the body they belong to (and name the collector accordingly), create one Mesh Collector per face or just move each mesh into a separate Mesh Collector.
Honourable Mentions and Concluding Remarks
Besides the updates mentioned above Simcenter 3D and Simcenter Nastran 2512 contains improvements to SOL101 where MUMPS now is the default solver yielding reduced solving time and better SMP support. In Pre/Post the multi-block decomposition functionality has been improved to reduce the number of triangular elements created while meshing. Moreover, the 3D Hexahedral-dominant mesher now supports a minimum feature size to consider while meshing, and the meshing command will now abstract features below this value. To get information of all the updates made in this release have a closer look at What’s new in Simcenter 3D 2512 and Simcenter Nastran 2512 Release Guide.
This post was made using SC3D version 2512 and for sure this version adds even stronger capability to create highly automated, robust CAE workflows from the CAD through to the FEM and to the simulation stage of your models. Try it out, and as always, if you run into issues, you can always send an email at support@volupe.com.
Viktor Hultgren, M.Sc.
Contact: support@volupe.com
+46 704 21 06 61
