Dassault Systèmes Announces New Release of Abaqus Unified FEA from SIMULIA

Paris, France, and Providence, R.I., USA, November 20, 2008 – Dassault Systèmes (DS) (Euronext Paris: #13065, DSY.PA), a world leader in 3D and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solutions, today announced the availability of Abaqus 6.8 Extended Functionality (6.8-EF), its technology-leading finite element analysis (FEA) software suite from SIMULIA.

Engineers, designers, researchers, and scientists use  Abaqus to lower costs and reduce cycle times through the realistic simulation of all products, materials, and processes behaviors, including stress, impact, crush, fluid-structure interaction, and thermal dynamics.

Abaqus 6.8-EF includes new and improved capabilities in general contact, the modeling of spot welds, fasteners, and elastomeric foams, and computational performance. It is focused on delivering technology to solve specific engineering challenges across all industries including automotive, aerospace, electronics, energy, packaged goods, and medical devices.

“The latest release of Abaqus demonstrates SIMULIA’s commitment to delivering innovative realistic simulation technology for our customers in a wide range of industries,” stated Steve Crowley, director of product management, SIMULIA. “The new and enhanced features in Abaqus 6.8-EF, will enable our customers to deepen their understanding of product behavior and accelerate the development of innovative products.”

Key enhancements in the new release include:

• The new general contact implementation in Abaqus/Standard offers a simplified and highly automated method for defining contact interactions. This capability is useful for a diverse range of industry applications—from automotive transmissions and brake assemblies, to medical devices and surgical equipment, to the behavior and manufacturing of packaged goods.
• New Abaqus/CAE modeling techniques for spot welds and fasteners allow users to create attachment points that follow a model edge or conform to a regular pattern, particularly useful for simulation of welded automotive and aerospace components.
• A low-density foam model in Abaqus/Explicit enables automotive engineers to simulate energy-absorbing materials in crash applications. This capability allows users to model the low-density, highly compressible elastomeric foams that are widely used in automobile passive safety systems. This can also be used in the design of foams commonly used in packaging of hand-held and other electronic devices.
• A selective subcycling feature in Abaqus/Explicit helps engineers in defense and shipbuilding to evaluate the realistic behavior of the very large structures that are common to those industries. This feature improves model performance by enabling much larger mesh densities in areas undergoing large strains, such as in the analysis of ship structures or land vehicles subjected to impact.
• An enhanced SolidWorks Associative Interface provides geometry transfer and maintains the relationship between SolidWorks and Abaqus models. Updates include improved performance and robustness for large assemblies and support for SolidWorks 2009.

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