MSC Software Corporation today announced a new release of MSC Apex, the company's award winning next generation Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) platform. The MSC Apex Cheetah release introduces:
- The third release of MSC Apex Modeler - A CAE Specific direct modeling and meshing solution that streamlines CAD clean-up, simplification, and meshing workflow.
- The first release of MSC Apex Structures - An add-on to MSC Apex Modeler which now expands MSC Apex to a fully integrated and generative structural analysis solution.
The new release enhances the engineer's workflow and daily productivity with many innovative modeling and analysis capabilities, and gives more engineers the ability to perform design analysis.
“Cheetah is a milestone release for MSC Apex, now delivering its first solver integrated solution for interactive and incremental structural analysis,” said Hugues Jeancolas, MSC Apex Product Manager. “Modeling, validating, solving, and exploring designs has never been this efficient and easy. MSC Apex helps users to crush the amount of time that it normally takes to build and validate models, a task that does not add any value to the design process. This frees our users to focus on delivering not just acceptable designs but ones that are optimal - in an environment that is fun to use.”
Key productivity accelerators include:
Geometry clean-up and Meshing
55% of engineers spend more than 40% of their time on geometry clean up and meshing, according to a recent survey conducted with leading manufacturing companies. MSC Apex Modeler continues to deliver breakthrough capabilities to speed the CAD to mesh process and improve productivity with a new Geometry Checks tool, robustness enhancements to Geometry Cleanup Stitching and Surface Auto extend capabilities, a new user interface for De-featuring, and a new Automated Mesh Improve capability and user defined mesh quality criteria. While the previous release, Black Marlin, delivered on ease-of-use, with these enhancements, MSC Apex Cheetah brings productivity and speed, in particular for mid-surface geometry creation, clean-up and meshing.
Solver Validated Modeling
67% of engineers need 2 to 4 solver runs to obtain a converged solution. MSC Apex Cheetah enhances the simulation workflow by delivering an innovative Analysis Readiness tool that allows the user to validate models before submitting the analysis. The Analysis Readiness tool leverages integrated solver methods to check on element quality, proper material and section attribution, part connectivity, and proper loads and constraints definitions. The tool is integrated with the MSC Apex generative framework and automatically updates as the user builds the model. This ensures all models created within the application are always solver compliant and run-ready.
Assembly Representations
MSC Apex Cheetah also enhances the simulation workflow to support large assemblies with the introduction of assembly representations, and glue connections. The concept of assembly representations allows the user to manage multiple configured assemblies of parts, and enables a divide and conquer approach to incrementally define, validate, and analyze large, complex assemblies. With Cheetah, users will also now be able to manage, attribute, assemble, and analyze orphan meshes with the support for MSC Nastran bulk data files (BDF) import.
Generative Linear Structural Analysis
With MSC Apex Cheetah, users can now define scenarios, loads, and boundary conditions, analyze, and post process results for Linear Static and Normal Modes. MSC Apex Structures combines Computational Parts and Assemblies' technology with a generative framework, which enables interactive and incremental analysis. With Computational Parts and Assemblies, MSC Apex is a true parts-based solution, where each part behavioral representation (stiffness, mass, and damping) can be pre-computed and stored independently. This approach is especially efficient when combined with the MSC Apex generative framework, as the solver execution will only re-compute behavioral representations for parts that have changed since the last solver execution. This new solver architecture is especially efficient in the context of trade studies.
MSC Apex was recently awarded NASA Tech Briefs 2014 Product of the Year and Design News Golden Mousetrap Award.
