ENGINEERING

MSC.Software Corp. , the leading global provider of virtual product development (VPD) products including simulation software and services, today announced that ASC, a supplier of vehicle development and subassembly for the global automotive market has chosen MSC.Software's SimDesigner and MSC.Software Professional Services to help them improve their product development process and the performance on convertible car top mechanisms. "For those customers who are CATIA users, our SimDesigner product line provides an excellent way to easily integrate VPD within product development processes and improve the performance of designs," said Doug Peterson, vice president, products division, MSC.Software. "We look forward to continuing our work with ASC and are confident that they will continue to see positive returns as they expand usage of VPD tools and techniques." "ASC's customers want to know which parts might fail under extreme conditions; to provide customers with this information our design engineering team is moving from the traditional build, test and rebuild process to the virtual design, analyze and verify product development process with SimDesigner for CATIA V5," says Stephen Doncov, CAE Specialist, ASC Incorporated. "With Virtual Product Development, multiple iterations are virtually tested in the computer. Failures occur virtually, are fixed virtually and only when the best design is identified is physical testing used for validation. Embedded analysis tools used earlier in the design process enables ASC's design engineering team to save a substantial amount of time and money." MSC.Software, in partnership with ASC, began this project in early 2004 to perform a set of virtual analyses on a header latch system for a convertible vehicle. SimDesigner Motion was used to test the operational effort required to move the latch system from its fully opened to fully closed position. The target force magnitude range was compared against the measured force determined by the ADAMS/Solver, which is embedded into CATIA V5 as part of the SimDesigner Motion product. To successfully analyze this system it was critical that the system compliance was accurately accounted for. SimDesigner Motion is equipped with this much-needed functionality, which includes the capability of defining linear/torsional springs and dampers and defining solid-to-solid 3D intermittent contact. A second set of analyses, FE analyses, was performed on the very same header latch system. SimDesigner Linear (embedded MSC.Nastran solver) and SimDesigner Nonlinear (embedded MSC.Marc solver) were used to test whether or not the individual flexible parts of the header latch system would exceed the ultimate strength, as defined by the assigned material properties, under three different loading conditions. SimDesigner Linear was used primarily to determine which parts were critical for each analysis. Parts that showed low stress were removed while parts with high stress were kept. To successfully perform the ultimate strength tests it was essential that the parts were able to experience plastic deformation. SimDesigner Nonlinear provides the ability to define precise stress-strain data for each part. Additionally, the ability to define local meshing made it possible to focus on the areas of each part in which higher stress results were discovered. Based on the results of the SimDesigner Nonlinear analysis a redesign took place. Following the redesign an additional analysis was performed to validate it. A physical failure test that proceeded the virtual testing confirmed that the new design would pass the ultimate strength criteria by a comfortable amount. The seamless connection between CATIA V5 and SimDesigner product family as a whole enables the designers and analysts to more effectively interact and more efficiently complete a multitude of projects similar to the header latch system analysis described here.