MSC Nastran delivers a broad range of new capabilities while accelerating performance

MSC Software Corporation announced the new release of MSC Nastran 2014 and Patran 2014. MSC Nastran 2014 delivers significant enhancements to its groundbreaking solver embedded fatigue functionality as well as performance improvements and ease of use. Patran 2014 supports the new fatigue analysis capabilities and delivers improvements to nonlinear analysis support.

Release highlights of MSC Nastran:

Linear Analysis

The highly popular external superelement (SE) capability of MSC Nastran has been enhanced providing users with the ability to rotate, move or mirror a primary external SE. This capability is designed to reduce the modeling effort for full vehicle analysis with duplicate assemblies like aircraft engines attached to wings, or landing gears attached to the fuselage.
New capability was added to activate and deactivate rigid elements in subcases and improve flexibility in defining combinations of load cases often used for safety related industries and airline certification.

Nastran Embedded Fatigue
Several enhancements have been implemented in this release to improve the efficiency and ease of use of MSC Nastran’s award winning solver embedded fatigue capabilities. These include:

Support for seam and spot welds fatigue analysis making it easier to identify the critical welds in automobiles and other structures subjected to repeated loads.
Multi-axial assessment provides insight into validity of the standard stress-life or strain-life fatigue analysis.
Support for the industry standard remote parameter control (RPC) files helping engineers to drive the load history based upon measured data.
Improved performance with no loss in accuracy.

Advanced Nonlinear
MSC Nastran 2014 provides robust contact capability for assembly modeling, which is often used to join discontinuous meshes or general contact including friction and heat transfer. It is no longer necessary to identify the master and slave body and reduce the dependency on the mesh size, leading to simplified set-up time. Solutions for complex problems such as eigenvalue extraction on pre-stressed bodies encountered in the wind turbine arena have also been improved.

Explicit Nonlinear
Explicit nonlinear analysis capabilities of MSC Nastran are often used to solve complex fluid-structure interaction (FSI) problems, which require large computational resources. Defining the coupling surface between the fluid and the surface has been improved with the MSC Nastran 2014 release. The performance on multi-core configurations has been improved by a factor of two to allow more design studies.

Numerical Methods and High Performance Computing
MSC continues to work with its partners to provide the ultimate computational performance

MSC Nastran’s nonlinear solution now utilizes the latest multi-core hardware to provide greater through-put. Wall-time can be reduced by as much as a factor of two.
Model frequency response analysis is improved with 3X faster performance in frequency computations for non-symmetric systems. This is particularly important for those in the automotive industry where the inclusion of tire rolling models results in non-symmetric models.
Exterior acoustics problems can be solved in a fraction of the time utilizing the parallel Krylov solver. The method is particularly effective for Frequency Response Analysis where wall clock time can be reduced by over 95%
Other enhancements include improvements to axisymmetric harmonic concentrated mass element, and new outputs for composite shell elements.

Patran 2014
The new release of Patran provides support for the new capabilities of MSC Nastran and MSC Fatigue. The CAD import / export capability has been significantly improved to support recent CAD systems and is 25% faster. The GUI drives the new MSC Nastran Embedded Fatigue capabilities. As model size increases to ensure greater fidelity of the model, Patran 2014 has been enhanced to provide faster visualization.

MSC Software
www.mscsoftware.com