New Version of FEA Solver

SimScale announces the upgrade of its solver for both structural and thermo-structural analyses to bring increased speed and robustness across all FEM-based simulation types available on the cloud-based CAE platform.

Following the release of a completely reworked Workbench in December last year along with multiple feature releases for computational fluid dynamics (CFD), the cloud simulation provider now brings FEA to focus by releasing automatic contact detection, improved robustness of the PETSC solver and reduced memory requirements for MUMPS.

While finite element analyses on CAD assemblies have been possible with SimScale before, a better way of properly constraining a model is a requirement that has been requested by many users. Moving away from manually having to define contacts, the online simulation platform can now automatically detect contacts between parts of an assembly, saving time and improving the user’s experience. The feature is already available and can be used for all finite element analysis types—static, dynamic, heat transfer, thermomechanical and frequency analysis.

Automatic contact detection will be triggered automatically whenever a new multiple-part geometry is assigned to a simulation. By default, all contacts in the assembly will always be created as bonded contacts, and can then be edited by the user. The possibility of manually triggering contact detection is also available. Once completed, all detected contacts are grouped to create a constrained system. In addition, a newly added feature makes it possible to convert one or multiple contacts into a physical/nonlinear contact.

A significant performance improvement of up to 40 percent, as well as better scalability of the main system solvers (MUMPS, PETSC and MultFront), has also recently been reached.

“With the new version of the FEA solver, it is now possible to successfully use PETSC for highly nonlinear analyses involving contact and nonlinear materials. The memory requirements of the MUMPS solver have been significantly reduced (up to 50 percent in some cases), which enables running larger CAD models,” said Alex Fischer, product vice president at SimScale.

Apart from new features being released monthly, an improvement of user experience with the cloud-based simulation platform is now in full swing at SimScale, following the company’s mission of making computer-aided engineering not only accessible but also as easy to use as possible.