Most Real-World Problems are Nonlinear

As we prepare to introduce our new release of Marc 2010, I felt compelled to talk about some of the product’s new features.  There is an array of exciting new capabilities in the release that I think users will be thrilled to see.  I know I was.

Linear stress analysis is often the first thing that comes to mind when one refers to FEA, but most problems engineers face today during the design process involve complex interactions that are not well addressed with linear statics. 

Being a provider of CAE technology for 47 years now, we at MSC have witnessed nonlinear analysis become more commonplace in manufacturing industries with advancements in multi-core desktop systems and parallel processing technology.  More engineers are doing nonlinear simulations as the technology finally becomes easier to use and as they begin to take advantage of advanced multi- processor computing power to run more analyses on bigger models in less time than with single CPUs. 

So…since most real-world problems are in fact nonlinear in nature, I think it’s time Marc is given the kudos it deserves. It truly does help engineers tackle the toughest of engineering problems, and we are sincerely happy to have such committed and happy Marc customers around the world.

Here are some cool things that are brought forth in this new release: 

New Parallel Solvers Deliver Cost Savings & Better Performance: Users can now take full advantage of multi-core machines for parallelization and see significant benefits in performance and cost.  The Marc 2010 release provides new solver capabilities that take advantage of multi-core systems without the need to purchase DDM licenses.  Both shared memory and distributed memory parallel solvers are now available allowing significant speed up even with a single CPU run. With the new solver enhancements for parallelization, we have seen excellent scalability. A 300,000 DOF thermo-mechanical creep analysis of a ball grid array is solved 7.1 times faster with DDM compared to a single CPU run, while 700,000 DOF model is run 13.6 times faster.

Contact Enhancements Allow Quicker Model Creation:  A new procedure for contact based on segment-to-segment for 2D and surface-to-surface for 3D is now available.  This method is beneficial for assembly modeling and interference fit problems.  Users can expect to see more accurate and smoother results especially near contact boundaries. 

Large Deformation Enhancements Improve Convergence: Updated Lagrange analysis is improved to handle large shell and beam rotations more accurately and with improved convergence. This enhancement is beneficial for most Marc users who deal with large deformation and large rotation problems.

Global Adaptive Meshing Increases Efficiency: Global adaptive meshing now works with two additional features, global-local analysis and EXLUDE option.  By supporting these two features, users can make better use of global remeshing in difficult contact situations.  Another significant enhancement related to remeshing is support for DDM. Until now, users could not use DDM if any of the contact bodies had to undergo remeshing. With this capability, users can solve larger models that undergo large deformation and need remeshing for better results, like in 3D seals and forming. 

Wear Improvements Speed Solution: This release introduces improvements for wear simulation.  Users will see more accurate calculation of wear especially for deformable-deformable contact. Benefits include a faster solution, more accurate results and the ability to associate wear with contact bodies.  Applications that will see advantages include disk brakes, cutting, rolling, engines, bearings, gears, linear sliding mechanisms, and tires. 

Multiphysics Enhancements Extend Magnetostatic and Electromagnetics: Marc has the capabilities to solve magnetostatic and electromagnetic field problems along with the ability to calculate the magnetostatic forces and ohmic losses experienced by any structure in the field. The specification of current loads is further enhanced in Marc 2010.  In this release, practically occurring windings or current coils can be defined in the natural way and specified with current, instead of the current density. This feature takes care of winding cross-section and complex winding paths. This is implemented for the magnetostatic and electromagnetic analysis. With magnetostatic-thermal coupling, heat generation due to applied currents flowing through conductors in magnetostatic devices can be computed. Users can now determine the losses associated with ferromagnetic cores consisting of laminations of thin magnetic sheets, which are heavily used in power industry devices such as alternators, synchronous generators, DC generators and motors, transformers, induction motors, relays and switch gear. 

Watch Marc 2010 preview videos http://pages.mscsoftware.com/MarcVideos.html 

For more information on What’s New in Marc 2010, please watch our on-demand webcast by visiting www.mscsoftware.com. 

Best,

Leslie

April 14th, 2010 | Tags: Electromagnetics, Magnetostatics, Marc, multiphysics, nonlinear FEA | Category: Uncategorized