In Brief - CAE

Airpak 2.0 is airflow modeling software from Fluent (Lebanon, NH). Designed to be used early in the design process, this release features faster model building and solutions, with easier creation of pictures, plots, and animations. This CFD tool lets the user model airflow, heat transfer, contaminant transport, and thermal comfort, in either ventilation systems or external building flows. Airpak exports animations directly in MPEG, AVI, animated GIF, or FLI file formats. And instead of building models from scratch, users can directly import existing CAD geometries or surfaces in IGES or DXF. It also includes a new indoor turbulence model for room ventilation, and capability to account for day, time, geography, and surface orientation. Enter 648

EASi-CRASH DYNA version 1.6, from EASi (Madison Heights, MI), is a crash simulation package that integrates all aspects of building models, preparing data-sets, evaluating results, and comparing designs. Updates from the last release include: enhanced seatbelt routing process; a spreadsheet to display information either by assembly, group, CAD, or FE part; support for optimized IGES loading with surface shading; Windows NT compatibility; support of MADYMO and DYNA dummy positioning; capability to mesh single or stitched surfaces; automatic weld generation; and enhanced post-processing. Enter 649

Timeline is a graphical utility from ALGOR (Pittsburgh, PA) for specifying and visualizing results of transient FEA tools, such as the company's Mechanical Event Simulation (MES). Instead of transferring time-based event curves from third-party spreadsheets, users can do this within ALGOR, and more easily catch set-up errors prior to analysis. Timeline includes two components: Event Editor-a spreadsheet-style way to define individual events or loads-and Event Viewer-to validate setup by displaying curves. Enter 650