MSC Software Corporation has released MSC Nastran 2013. The new features of MSC Nastran 2013 deliver customization and broader solution capabilities that generate significant time savings in automotive and aerospace simulation workflows.

Release highlights:

Embedded Fatigue Analysis

The new release integrates industry leading fatigue analysis capabilities within MSC Nastran. Engineers can now calculate fatigue damage and life using theMSC Nastran solver without the need to export results to a separate fatigue solution. What was once a post-processing exercise is now an integral part of the analysis process, providing multiple advantages, one of which is the ability to do weight optimization while constraining fatigue life.

• Significant time savings are achieved by avoiding sequential process steps in the durability calculations. This reduces both computational time (in one scenario, a fatigue analysis that traditionally took 8 hours, took just 38 minutes) and dramatically improves ease of use (200 files to process is reduced to 2)
• Users can now perform design optimization in conjunction with fatigue analysis, which leads to better designs that last longer. One example led to a 24% mass reduction and at the same time fatigue life was increased by 14%

Poroelastic Material Modeling

Trim components are used extensively in automobiles and aircrafts to dampen the vibrations and improve the cabin comfort for the occupants. The new version supports the poroelastic behavior of these trim components to analyze the vibroacoustic performance of the vehicle by modeling the complex multi-physics of the fluid-solid interaction, resulting in improved simulation accuracy.

Advanced Nonlinear

The new release provides additional flexibility in model creation and functionality to improve accuracy of systems analysis.

• User defined material subroutine has been improved enabling engineers to define new state variables and with ability to pass additional internal variables
• Enforced relative motion capability is improved for better nonlinear dynamic analysis of structures
• MNF files that are used by Adams to simulate deformation in flexible bodies can now be exported at a deformed configuration as well

Explicit Nonlinear

Several new capabilities to improve the performance of the numerically intensive blast and general fluid-structure interaction (FSI) applications have been implemented in this release. They include:

• New 1D to 3D and 2D to 3D axisymmetric mapping for blast loads in Eulerian solver. With this capability, users can improve the computational speed of these analyses by performing one- or two-dimensional analyses and mapping the results to a three dimensional mesh when needed to account for effect of the wave on a structure.
• Multiple detonation points with varying ignition times for blast applications to analyze multiple blasts and their effects on structural integrity
• New methodology to define blast loads based on empirical data in LS-Dyna
• New LS-Dyna libraries based on LS-Dyna version MPP 971s R6.0.0
• Enhancements to FSI algorithms to speed up the simulation time, with over 60% improvement seen in single core runs and even better performance for multicore runs.

SuperComputing

With solver enhancements and parallelization capabilities, MSC Nastran delivers performance improvements for a variety of analyses. Greater use of parallelization and GPGPU technology results in 20%-50% reduction in solution times over previous release, providing an opportunity to simulate more designs.

• Improved support for GPU devices for higher productivity
• DMP (Distributed Memory Parallel) capabilities for advanced nonlinear analysis capabilities made more efficient (57% reduction in analysis time was achieved for a customer model)
• New memory management to minimize memory use in order to conserve resources in a multi-user environment

For more details about the new release, watch the MSC Nastran 2013 release webinar at http://bit.ly/12QXrFc