AUTOMOTIVE

"We are seeing a trend within our long-time customers who want to expand their skill set and utilize new, complementary technologies. With the importance placed on durability as a way to reduce warranty costs, products like MSC.Fatigue are a natural extension of the work our customers are already doing," said Frank Perna, chairman and chief executive officer of MSC.Software. "We have a very clear strategy for increasing the software usage of our installed base and the key to that strategy is to provide them with new, easy-to-use tools that are well-integrated within their engineering environment. MSC.Fatigue is this kind of tool and we look forward to it's continued growth in 2005 and beyond." Mechanical systems that fail while in operation cause serious problems for all parties involved. Manufacturers are faced with high warranty costs and liabilities, but more importantly, the safety of persons operating faulty cars, trucks, aircraft, or machinery may be at risk. To reduce the risk that their products will fatigue prematurely or unexpectedly, manufacturers may over-design parts using much higher than necessary margins of safety, which adds weight and cost, or rely heavily on physical fatigue tests to accurately predict failure conditions and life expectancy, which increases costs and time-to-market. As a key component in the Virtual Product Development (VPD) process and a member of the SimOffice family of products, MSC.Fatigue enables customers to quickly and qualitatively predict the effect of proposed design changes on product life. Used in conjunction with MSC's broad suite of VPD tools, MSC.Fatigue allows users to optimize their designs for strength, weight, and shape. Some of the new benefits and capabilities in MSC.Fatigue 2005 r1 include the following: Reduced simulation set-up time when using the Aerospace Load Spectrum capability: This enhanced capability provides an option to import data from an ASCII file for block creation. Industrial strength simulations using the Large Model Translation capability in FATTRANS: The translation of large models is performed by using logic to break up the model in groups based on available memory. Intelligent messaging is available to guide the user to override the default memory allocation and specify custom memory allocation. Enhanced productivity using the new SIMMAX utility: SIMMAX extracts a time history from a series of DAC files or a single RPC file based on two methods: -- Location of max peak, min valley, or abs max in the control channel -- Scanning input channels for the single largest maximum, minimum or absolute maximum and extracting for each channel, the simultaneous values of all other channels at the position of the largest event Expanded scope of Virtual Product Development using Gray Cast Iron analysis: This new capability takes into account the dominant influence of the flake-like shape of graphite in Gray Cast Iron on its mechanical properties. The graphite flakes act as stress raisers, which may prematurely cause localized plastic flow at low stresses, and initiate fracture in the matrix at higher stresses. Enhanced Integration with MSC.Patran through full support of CWELD Spot Weld Modeling capability: Simulation of realistic loading environments utilizing the Redesign Duty Cycle capability: The Redesign Duty Cycle takes advantage of several capabilities including the ability to use load time histories directly from the source directory, the ability to add or delete sequences, events and time histories, the ability to independently configure events and a reporting tool that provides users with damage statistics from events and sequences. Leverage diverse Operating System based computational resources on the network and expect robust/faster simulations using Analysis Manager: In this new version, the Windows-Unix interaction limitation has been removed. Additionally, the input to Analysis Manager is handled without any user intervention. MSC.Fatigue is developed in close cooperation with nCode, MSC.Software's fatigue and durability partner. MSC.Fatigue is currently available under the MSC.MasterKey licensing System (formerly the VPD Campus Licensing System). The MSC.MasterKey system is tailored to the unique environment of every customer, maximizing productivity and engineering budgets by providing full-range simulation capabilities and flexible product management from a token-based system. For more information on MSC.Fatigue please visit http://www.mscsoftware.com/products/.