Dassault Systèmes (DS) today announced the availability of Abaqus 6.9, its technology-leading unified finite element analysis (FEA) product suite from SIMULIA.

Abaqus is used by designers, engineers, and researchers in a broad range of industries, including electronics, consumer packaged goods, aerospace, automotive, energy, and life sciences to evaluate real-world behavior of materials, products, and manufacturing processes. This release delivers key new capabilities for fracture and failure, high-performance computing, and noise and vibration. In addition, SIMULIA is continuing to enrich the product suite with capabilities for modeling, meshing, contact, materials, and multiphysics.

“In order to meet today’s fast-paced development requirements, up-front simulation techniques play a major role,” states Frank Popielas, Manager Advanced Engineering, Sealing Products Group, Dana Holding Corporation. “The synergy between Abaqus 6.9 and high-performance computing clusters will help us minimize the unit cost and retain optimal turn-around time.”

“By working closely with our customers on the definition and review of new functionality, we have developed the most robust finite element analysis software available,” stated Steve Crowley, director of product management, SIMULIA, Dassault Systèmes. “Abaqus 6.9 provides manufacturing companies with the ability to consolidate their nonlinear and linear analysis processes within a unified FEA environment.”

Release Highlights:

• The Extended Finite Element Method (XFEM) has been implemented in Abaqus and provides a powerful tool for simulating crack growth along arbitrary paths that do not correspond to element boundaries. In the aerospace industry, XFEM can be used in combination with other Abaqus capabilities to predict the durability and damage tolerance of composite aircraft structures. In the energy industry, it can assist in evaluating the onset and growth of cracks in pressure vessels.
• The general contact implementation offers a simplified and highly automated method for defining contact interactions in a model. This capability provides substantial efficiency improvements in modeling complex assemblies such as gear systems, hydraulic cylinders, or other products that have parts that come into contact.
• A new cosimulation method allows users to combine the Abaqus implicit and explicit solvers into a single simulation—substantially reducing computation time. For example, automotive engineers can now combine a substructure representation of a vehicle body with a model of the tires and suspension systems to evaluate the durability of a vehicle running over a pothole.
• Abaqus/CAE provides faster, more robust meshing and powerful results visualization techniques.
• Enhanced performance of the AMS eigensolver significantly improves the efficiency of large-scale linear dynamics workflows used for applications such as automotive noise and vibration analyses.
• A new viscous shear model allows the simulation of non-Newtonian fluids such as blood, paste, molten polymers, and other fluids often used in consumer product and industrial applications.

For a more complete list of new features and enhancements, visit: www.simulia.com/products/abaqus_fea.