Dassault Systèmes Announces New Release of Abaqus FEA from SIMULIA

DESIGN TOOLS:   Dassault Systèmes recently announced the availability of Abaqus 6.9 Extended Functionality (6.9-EF), its technology-leading unified finite element analysis (FEA) product suite from SIMULIA.Designers, engineers and researchers in a broad range of industries use Abaqus to predict the real-world behavior of products, materials, and manufacturing processes. This latest release delivers key new features and enhancements for modeling, advanced mechanics, and performance. These ongoing improvements are enabling customers to consolidate their simulation software, thereby lowering cost and increasing efficiency in their product development process.

New features and enhancements in Abaqus 6.9-EF release include:

Modeling
•Interactive support is provided for meshing models using cylindrical elements, which can be useful in the analysis of pipelines by oil and gas companies.
•Geometry repair tools in Abaqus/CAE offer greater flexibility and broader scope for systematically adjusting the geometry of a model in preparation for meshing.
•An interface for model change definitions allows the deactivation and reactivation of model regions and contact pairs during an analysis.
•Users can now define direct cyclic and low-cycle fatigue analysis procedures in Abaqus/CAE. Low-cycle fatigue analysis can be used to efficiently predict fatigue life in electronic components such as solder joints.
•Discrete orientations provide a convenient method for accurately defining spatially varying material orientations on models with curved geometries such as aircraft panels and car bodies.

Advanced Mechanics
•Viscoelastic behavior can be now modeled with orthotropic/anisotropic elasticity in Abaqus/Explicit, which provides more realistic composite damage prediction.
•A new and efficient method is available for analyzing structures subject to air blast loading, which is useful for safety evaluation in the civil engineering and defense industries.
•Continued advancements in fracture and failure include contour integral evaluation for cracks defined with XFEM and the inclusion of the Virtual Crack Closure Technique (VCCT) in Abaqus/Explicit, which allows users to model brittle fracture of partially bonded surfaces.
•Breakthrough improvement in the implicit dynamics procedure helps solve unstable problems involving contact, buckling, and material failure. Examples include impact inside gear mechanisms and medical device deployment within patients.
Performance
•A new iterative solver in Abaqus/Standard provides performance gains up to 20x or more in comparison to the direct sparse solver. The iterative solver is intended for very large simulation problems typically found in applications such as powertrain, oil reservoir, and material microstructure simulations.
•Performance of creating high-quality surface meshes using the mapped meshing technique has been significantly improved. Depending on the part, performance gains of 2x to 40x are possible. This is extremely useful in meshing engine blocks and ship hulls.

- Edited by Liz Taurasi