Making good on its promise earlier this fall to embrace an industry focus and highlighting the growing importance of addressing composite design in an end-to-end product development platform, Siemens PLM Software, a division of Siemens AG, has acquired Vistagy, a provider of a specialized composite engineering software.
The pair have had a long-standing partnership and share a number of marquee customers, including SpaceX and Daimler. Top officials at both firms couched the acquisition as a natural fit, explaining that ongoing customer discussions revealed demand for even tighter integration between the two platforms going forward.
FiberSIM's volume fill composite ply development capability goes to work on a jet engine fan blade created in Siemens NX.
"This has been an area we've been looking at for a number of years," Tony Affuso, chairman of Siemens PLM Software, told Design News. "Many of our customers using this capability have asked us to integrate it closer into our environment. There were so many requests coming from customers, we put it on our radar screen as something we wanted to own at some point."
While Vistagy had access to Siemens' APIs as part of its partnership, Vistagy's main offering -- FiberSIM -- was limited to how tightly it operated with Teamcenter, meaning users were sometimes left dealing with different systems, siloed data repositories, and oftentimes, a lot of legwork manually sharing data between the two platforms.
As part of single company, the two firms will focus on tighter integration, delivering a full suite of applications and an integrated data repository. It all fits into HD-PLM, Siemens' vision for delivering the information engineers need in the format that they need, and within the context for their role in the development effort, Affuso said.
As someone who's watched the evolution of the PLM industry over the last decade, Siemens and Dasault's recent acquisitions in the composites arena are significant not just because it gets both players much-needed composites capabilities. The investments in these industry-specific and highly specialized technology pieces seem to indicate that PLM as a platform has arrived at a place where the core building blocks are well established and companies seem to get the overall value proposition. Now the activity is around tuning the platforms to meet very specific industry requirements or customer needs. To me, that's a sign of maturity that can help drive the next stage of user adoption.
Purpose-tuning CAD tools for specific apps sounds like a great idea, and with composites, it's an applications area that's big enough where this makes economic sense. I've got two questions: Are there any other similar areas, say with ABS plastics? Also, is the CAD tool chain able to incorporate any intelligence which relates to any of the standards and/or compliance issues regarding composites?
As far as I know, there isn't the same concerted effort to add modules of capabilities around plastics, although I'm sure there are smatterings of features related to plastics design in all of the major tools. Autodesk did release something called Moldflow, which is a cloud-based simulation offering specifically around simulating the design of plastics parts.
As for intelligence capabilities around meeting compliance standards, many of the CAD and PLM tools are building out capabilities around product analytics, including capabilities to evaluate product designs against compliance benchmarks. Not sure composites is readily addressed yet, but as the material become more mainstream, I'm sure it's only a matter of time before it will.
The timing is right on this. We saw big use of composites in the Boeing 787, as well as in countless other commercial and military aircraft. Automakers are promising to use more composites -- see the story on the BMW electric concept vehicles, which will come out in 2013 and 2014.
I agree, Chuck. I think all of those milestones coupled with the automotive, aerospace, and marine industries' increased adoption of composites (all big markets for Siemens) is what precipated the acqusition. Vistagy has a strong hand in both automotive and aerospace, both in terms of customers and industry best practices--both very important assets to Siemens' evolving PLM strategy.
As a composites technologist with over 40 years in the industry, I consider this a very significant development. Industrial applications are now the greatest market for composites, significantly outstripping aerospace and sports equipment. Another significant development is that, although polymer matrix composites dominate, there is growing interest in ceramic matrix composites and metal matrix composites. In addition to structural and machine applications, composites are playing and increasing role in electronics and photonics thermal management and heat exchangers.
Carl Zweben PhD - Composites and Thermal Materials
Life Fellow, ASME; Fellow, SAMPE & ASM
Associate Fellow, AIAA
62 Arlington Road
Devon, PA 19333-1538
USA
Phone:610-688-1772
Email: c.h.zweben@usa.netWebsite: http://sites.google.com/site/zwebenconsulting
Beth composite use especially in the auto industry isn't stopped by lack of tech, but because they only build in steel. Why they build in steel is it rusts away thus one needs another car.
Vs composites which in 30 yrs will still be there, still lightweight, eff viable transport.
It's just not hard to build composite body/chassis/unibody including color, doors, hood, etc in under 10 manhrs/car at under $6/lb. Such a vehicle would weight 60% of a steel version while being more strong, crash resistant.
And the weight for a composite 2 seat sportwagon I have is under 250lbs. A similar steel one would be 450-600lbs. I should add this is using medium tech composites. And it was done without cad, etc. The other thing is a production line for a composite car costs 10% of a steel one and only needs 1k/yr units to be profitable.
While this stuff promoted by Siemens can be ok it isn't needed. What is needed is a change in the car industry to start using full composite cars, trucks, etc.
And it will happen for 2 reasons, much higher oil prices, $10/gal in 5 yrs and the price of steel, other metals. Vs composites that can be made from RE, biomass and sand which will be the low cost building materiasl in the near future by a good amount compared to metals.
The 3D printing revolution seems to have a knack for quickly moving technology ahead by way of collaborative effort and even a little friendly competition -- all of course in the name of scientific advancement.
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