CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
9 June 2004
Product News
COSMOS 2005 Packs 100 Enhancements and Advanced Analysis into Affordable, Easy-to-Use Applications
SolidWorks Corporation ( http://www.solidworks.com ) announced COSMOST 2005, the first product group to put advanced design analysis capabilities such as non-linear analysis and drop testing into an affordable, easy-to-use mainstream application. COSMOS 2005 also includes more than 100 user-driven enhancements that make sophisticated design analysis easy for virtually every person in product development, regardless of their technical expertise.
The entire COSMOS product line - COSMOSWorksT , COSMOSFloWorksT , and COSMOSMotionT - has been upgraded for 2005. In addition to the new simulation capabilities, the three COSMOS applications feature updated interfaces, simplified analysis processes, and tighter integration with SolidWorks® 3D mechanical design software. Tighter SolidWorks integration enables users to test their designs without leaving the SolidWorks environment, making analysis a seamless part of the design process. More than 12,000 companies in every industry all over the world use COSMOS to test designs throughout product development, preventing costly late-stage errors, improving time-to-market, and cutting material and labor costs.
Many of COSMOS 2005's new features - COSMOSWorks' new embedded non-linear analysis, fatigue, and drop testing, for example - are typically found only in complex and expensive analysis software. COSMOS' simplicity and affordability eliminate those barriers to using design analysis at every phase of the product design process.
COSMOS 2005 pays attention to the most minute details, down to re-designing the tool icons to make them more intuitive and upgrading the toolbars from 16 to 256 colors for a better look and feel. COSMOS has re-written error messages to give users more information about failures so they can correct them faster. Overlying these changes are major new features and performance upgrades in COSMOSWorks, COSMOSFloWorks, and COSMOSMotion. Among the major new capabilities in COSMOSWorks 2005 are:
• Embedded non-linear analysis, which calculates the behavior of products and materials that distort irregularly, such as O-rings, medical stents, airline luggage containers, and snap-clips. Contact analysis in an assembly between components made up of nonlinear materials is also included.
• Drop testing, which calculates stresses, deformations, and secondary impact when an object is dropped from a specified height.
• Embedded fatigue analysis, to predict failure or cumulative damage of products under cyclic or repetitive loading.
• Enhanced thermal analysis, which includes effect of temperature changes on material properties, such as conductivity and elasticity, and changes in boundary conditions such as convection and heat flux with temperature.
• Seamless load transfer from COSMOSMotion without a need for any external file, and also an option to transfer load for the entire motion cycle to study worse case scenario.
• Option to compare test results, such as stress and displacement data measured at different locations in a physical test with simulation results.
• Enhanced and new options to study mesh, such as mesh quality report for aspect ratios and element distortions, separate mesh folder and contact conditions for each study.
• Quick tips, which walks a new user step-by-step through the analysis process from defining loads to visualizing the results.
• Multi-processor support for solvers, which further reduces solution times.
COSMOSWorks 2005 also simplifies common analyses, such as bolted connections, that are time consuming to model in high-end analysis software. Testing a bolted connection's performance in COSMOS 2005 takes less than a minute, requiring the designer to do little more than specify the forces on the bolt. In a conventional application, it could take hours to model the same bolted connections.
COSMOSFloWorks 2005 features new performance, usability, and visualization features. The major improvements are faster convergence of transient analysis, new vorticity plot to study swirling flows, and a parametric study tool to conduct many "what if" scenarios. Other notable features in COSMOSFloWorks 2005 are:
• fully transparent bodies for solving heat radiation problems;
• automatic detection of inner fluid volume for initial condition in application with multiple fluids;
• boundary conditions as parameters in equation goals;
• enhanced particle tracking;
• 3D profile visualization and previews for cut plots;
• fully developed velocity profiles for inlet;
• automatic creation of coordinate system to define inlet swirls;
• ability to refine certain cell types in the entire computational domain; and
• extract mesh data from result file.
COSMOSMotion 2005 features support for multi-bodies in SolidWorks and automatic mapping of SolidWorks mates in sub-assembly components. New orthotropic bushings allow the user to define different joint translational and rotational properties for stiffness, damping, and preload values in the X,Y, and Z directions. Automatic mapping of advanced SolidWorks mates such as tangent surface-to-surface and point-to-surface is now supported. This allows easy simulation of mechanisms such as cams without the use of time consuming 3D contact conditions. The software also simplifies analysis on complicated assemblies through enhanced direct load transfers between COSMOSMotion and COSMOSWorks. Direct load transfer enables users to go back and forth from motion analysis to structural analysis without the time-consuming step of re-creating data models.
Pricing and availability
COSMOS 2005 will be available in midsummer for purchase in 12 languages worldwide. Contact a SolidWorks reseller for pricing information.
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