5 Benefits CEETRON SDKs Can Provide Your CAE Application

Developing CAE applications is resource-intensive, complex, and time-consuming. Successful developers do what they can to ensure they focus on what makes their product, their new idea, unique. With the CEETRON family of products and the tools they integrate with, Tech Soft 3D provides the only complete CAE component technology that supports pre-processing, solving, and post-processing workflows. 

Leveraging software development toolkits, or SDKs, is one way you can optimize your developer resources, get to market faster, and offer a high quality and more robust technology that better fits your customers' needs. Best of all, it allows you to focus your energy on what makes your application stand out, without reinventing the wheel.  

Tech Soft 3D’s CEETRON family of toolkits and its strong host of integrations can support you through every phase of the CAE workflow, from CAD import, mesh healing and meshing, solving, and post processing, all the way to publishing and sharing. Here, we will go through a typical CAE workflow and share the 5 things CEETRON can do for you.  

CEETRON Access & HOOPS Exchange Can Solve Your Data Import Needs 

For those working with CAE data from the start, CEETRON Access supports over 20 industry standard CAE formats, including Nastran, Abaqus, Ansys, LS-Dyna, Fluent, openFOAM, Ensight, and many more. If you were to develop these capabilities in-house, you and your team would have to spend a significant chunk of resources on their development and ever-present maintenance.  

CEETRON Access is a toolkit that easily adds reading and writing to your CAE application. This can support you and your customers’ need to quickly and reliably interoperate with popular simulation tools, all with less time and investment from your team.  

For example, CEETRON Access seamlessly allows optimization applications to consume CAE data from different solvers. The toolkit also caters for any CAE data forwarding needs, as those occurring when solvers are run one after another. 

But in the standard CAE workflow, the first step involves reading CAD geometries. Here, you can count on the industry-leading power of the data translation SDK HOOPS Exchange to import 30 CAD file formats including SOLIDWORKS, Inventor, CATIA, Revit, Creo, Solid Edge, and many more. 

Through the tight integrations with CEETRON Mesh and CEETRON Envision, all these CAD geometries are instantly available through their tessellations for meshing and visualization in CAE’s preprocessing stage. 

Fast, Reliable Support for CAD Tessellation Repair & Meshing 

Making any CAD tessellation ready for meshing often requires a capable mesh healing tool to get rid of self-intersections, watertight the geometry and – strictly speaking - make it manifold. Tech Soft 3D is a proud reseller of Polygonica, a mesh modelling toolkit that does wonders for these tasks (and more – such as offsetting, defeaturing and Boolean operations). 

Given a clean input, the 20+ years of proven performance of CEETRON Mesh empowers CAE applications with fully automated surface and volume meshing. Fully equipped with all the expected control options (mesh size, quality and geometric fidelity), CEETRON Mesh robustly outputs triangles and quads, and generates tetrahedral meshes.  

A Solving Toolkit for FEA Integration and Linear Algebra 

The landscape of CAE software can be split into two categories. First, there are applications that “produce CAE” - at their core is a simulation engine that produces results that predict the outcome of a given system using numerical methods such as the finite element method. On the other hand, other solutions “consume CAE”, taking simulation results as input to pursue other goals – for example, design optimization. 

CEETRON Solve has relevant technology for both types of CAE applications. It can be seen as an integrable FEA solver for CAE-consuming algorithms, removing the need for end users to transfer data to external applications. But CEETRON Solve is also a high-performance linear algebra library for simulation engines, offering high-performance multithreaded direct and iterative linear solvers as well as eigen solvers. 

Both use cases have been thoroughly put to the test for over 25 years by industry juggernauts like Dassault Systems (Wavesix), Hexagon (Romax), and nTop. 

CEETRON Envision Provides a Complete Visualization & Analysis Framework, Specialized in CAE Data 

Now for the fun bit: the visualization, and analysis of the results you and your customers worked so hard to achieve. CEETRON Envision is a complete framework that is specifically designed to handle CAE data. Available for both desktop and web developers, this tool can support your application through a comprehensive array of CAE post-processing, visualization, and sharing needs. 

For data processing CEETRON Envision can provide your application with high-end functionality in this area. These features include a series of high-speed extractions tools, including cutting planes, isosurfaces and isovolumes, history and length plots, and animations for transient, mode-shape, and particle tracing. The CPU and memory-optimized CAE data management ensures a more efficient experience for both your developers and the customers who will use your product. 

Supported results include scalars, vectors, displacements and symmetric tensors, with various interpolations (per node, per element, per element-node and per element-surface), as well as rigid body transformations.  

For visualization, CEETRON Envision offers a complete set of settings for views, parts, results, and data extractions which are rendered through OpenGL (desktop) and WebGL (web). 

In further detail, the web version provides WebGL client-side rendering based on highly optimized progressive 3D object streaming, allowing use of servers without GPU. Envision Web has two data models carefully optimized for two of the most common use cases for CAE applications: post-processing and viewing. Combined with Python automation, the latter offers highly scalable and cheap solutions to remote CAE applications. 

Finally, CEETRON Envision provides a universal display model sharing format. The toolkit supports lightweight storage of key results and allows you to embed results directly onto a web page, Word document, PowerPoint, or through HTML.  

The entire experience is designed to be as developer friendly as possible. Linux, MacOS, and Windows are supported, as are all of the most popular programing languages. There is no UI-toolkit dependency, and working with CEETRON Envision, like any CEETRON product, gets you access to one of the most important things CEETRON does for you… 

Tech Soft 3D Provide Unparalleled Support Through Your Applications Entire Lifecycle 

The CEETRON family of products are a fantastic series of SDKs, but a partnership with Tech Soft 3D gets you and your team far more than some code. Tech Soft 3D believes in creating a Strategic Technology Partnership with everyone they do business with, supporting you from development and shipping through to maintenance. You can take advantage of the team of CAE development experts, get access to rapid support, and build the kind of relationship you deserve to get your product vision to market faster.  

To learn more about CEETRON products, start a consultation, or simply ask a question, click here to talk to a Tech Soft 3D expert.