CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
11 January 2010
Product News
AVEVA Releases Finite Element Analysis Interface for Shipbuilders
AVEVA announced the release of AVEVA Hull Finite Element Modeller, a powerful new addition to the AVEVA Marine portfolio which accelerates and simplifies the stress analysis of ship structures.
Ship designers rely on the use of Finite Element Analysis (FEA) to ensure that hull structures comply with rigorous strength criteria and achieve low levels of vibration for maximum passenger comfort. FEA is a computational technique for stress and vibration analysis which entails the idealisation of a physical structure as a mesh of a very large number of small elements.
Although the analysis itself is a relatively rapid process, translating a vessel's hull structure into an idealised mesh in such a way as to achieve accurate and reliable analysis has long been a laborious and time-consuming process, which is normally repeated several times as the design evolves. Finally, it is common to include a detailed FEA in an approval submission to a classification society such as Lloyds Register or Bureau Véritas, in order to better demonstrate a vessel design's structural soundness.
Shipbuilding has now become such a rapid process that the FEA cycle itself can be the critical-path activity. Timescale pressures frequently require a shipyard to begin steel cutting before final design approval has been received, so a design change requirement from the classification society can result in costly construction rework.
AVEVA Hull Finite Element Modeller has been developed in collaboration with leading shipbuilders to overcome these problems. It applies sophisticated, rule-based methods to ensure the rapid idealisation of structures created in AVEVA Hull Structural Design, to faithfully represent the essential characteristics of the physical design while ensuring accurate and computationally-efficient analysis in third-party FEA programs.
Commenting on this important new release, Stéphane Neuvéglise, AVEVA's Product Marketing Manager for AVEVA Marine, said: ‘This product meets a widespread demand in the shipbuilding industry, which must meet stringent international regulations while faced with severe competitive pressure to achieve ever lower costs and shorter delivery times.
‘AVEVA engineers have worked closely with our collaboration partners to develop an extremely powerful and easy-to-use application which is already meeting or exceeding expectations on a number of different projects. Users have consistently reported achieving 30-50% reduction in direct man-hours for FEA, as well as valuable gains in design quality, timescale and avoidance of construction rework.'
AVEVA Hull Finite Element Modeller is available for immediate deployment in an AVEVA Marine environment and may be used effectively on all types of commercial or naval vessel designs, or other floating structures.
About AVEVA Hull Finite Element Modeller
It is used with AVEVA Hull Structural Design and exports idealised meshes either in ANSYS® APDL format, or in neutral XML format for other third-party FEA programs. It combines rule-based ‘intelligent' idealisation with extensively user-configurable parameters for the rapid creation of high-quality meshes. Hull structures may be idealised in their entirety or as selected blocks, with coarse or fine meshes, enabling rapid analysis in the early design stages and more detailed analysis of highly-stressed local areas as the design progresses.
More information about Hull Finite Element Modeller and other AVEVA Marine solutions may be found at http://www.aveva.com/marine.
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