CONTACT Software is now providing its offering for the early phase of product development and the rapid development and functional validation of model variants through an independent company. To do this, the company founded Fast Concept Modelling & Simulation GmbH, which is headquartered in Munich.
The subsidiary is responsible for business activities in the field of product validation. The offering is centered around Fast Concept Modelling (FCM), an innovative, CATIA CAA-based software that allows a greater degree of automation when using numeric calculation methods.
CONTACT's managing director Karl Heinz Zachries outlines the objectives of the new subsidiary: "This realignment will allow us to establish FCM in the market long-term by systematically driving forward the development and marketing of the product together with new partners." According to Zachries, the new, autonomous limited company will be able to concentrate on the extremely specialized domain of simulation and computation, operate with greater agility and provide an optimum response to the needs of CAE with FCM.
FCM is a unique solution: As CATIA Workbench, the concept tool permits rapid creation of parametric geometry models. It goes beyond the options of native CATIA parametrics and provides direct modeling techniques. Furthermore, FCM provides CATIA users with automatic definition of boundary and load conditions, assignment of attributes, networking, calculation and optimization in the loop. This means that companies can dispense with the laborious manual conditioning of CAD models for computer simulation and speed up the entire development process significantly.
Simplifications which are used for simulation do not change the original geometry. Changes to the model as a result of optimization are made to the geometry rather than to the computational mesh. This enables designers to continue with their work on their models immediately after functional validation.
FCM is an open system that uses readily available CAE software for the optimization loop and can be incorporated in an existing CAx environment with no special requirements. The result is that companies can move more rapidly from the initial idea for a product to a functionally validated concept that in turn allows seamless transition to series development.
