Key Takeaways from the CEETRON Digital Summit 2024
Harry Lees • Our 2024 CEETRON Digital Summit has come and gone and was a great opportunity for us to discuss Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) workflows and solutions, share updates to our SDKs, and shed the spotlight on a few of our partners. For those who missed it, or who simply prefer their information in written format, here are the most important takeaways from our CEETRON Summit. The major areas we covered are:
Why Use CAE Components in Your Application?
What SDKs does Tech Soft 3D Have to Offer for CAE?
What’s New & Upcoming with Tech Soft 3D SDK’s.
Partner Highlights: nTop and OPTIMAD.
For the full webinar experience, check out the video below.
Why Use CAE Components in Your Application?
A common CAE workflow involves a series of stages that all require complex, specialized tools to produce meaningful results.
The setup stage of this standard workflow revolves around providing the solver with the data it needs to produce useful simulations. To do this, applications need to support the ability to turn CAD data into usable meshes. This involves CAD tessellation of surfaces in the original CAD model, tessellation repair to ensure it is watertight and void of other anomalies, followed by a more detailed CAE meshing workflow. The latter offers control over mesh size, quality, and geometric precision.
From here, the solver does its work, physical modeling, numerical methods, linear algebra, structural analysis, and eigen problem work. All of this information is then accessible as a huge amount of raw data, ready for post-processing and analysis for meaningful results.
Developing all of these capabilities in-house is simply time-consuming, expensive, difficult, and often yields poorer results than existing tools. Specialized CAE software development kits (SDKs) can provide your application with a framework of readymade software components that address every major step of the CAE workflow. Developers can then focus their resources on the part of their product that makes them special, instead of reinventing the wheel.
The features provided by the component technology will have a level of market-testing and experience that in-house development is unlikely to match. All of this results in a more complete product being developed efficiently, with a significantly faster time-to-market.
There are drawbacks that come with component technology. There is a reduction in the level of control you will have over your application that comes with not creating something from scratch. Synchronizing releases of your application with that of the SDK can be tricky and can cause headaches for some developers and eventual customers. Choosing the right fit in component technology vendor can help you mitigate these downsides and is a big part of why toolkit decisions are so important.
What SDKs does Tech Soft 3D Offer for CAE Application Development?
Tech Soft 3D offers a diverse portfolio of SDKs to support the entire CAE workflow, from CAD data access to CAE data sharing and everything in between. These include:
HOOPS Exchange: An SDK specializing in CAD data translation, this is the industry leader for CAD import and export, with support for 30+ of the most popular formats all in a single API.
Polygonica: Tech Soft 3D is a proud reseller of this MachineWorks tool, providing a powerful Boolean engine for automatic mesh repair, offsetting, model simplification, and much more.
CEETRON Mesh: Fail-free toolkit that has been providing 2D and 3D meshing for more than 20 years.
CEETRON Solve: A multi-task SDK that provides developers with 30+ years of experience as a framework to both define and solve FEM models.
CEETRON Envision: The all-in-one SDK for CAE data import, analysis, visualization, reporting, and automation.
CEETRON Access: A toolkit designed for the universal reading and writing of CAE data, improving interoperability across a wide range of CAE formats.
What’s New & Upcoming with Tech Soft 3D’s CAE SDKs
A key part of the CEETRON Summit this year was sharing what was new and what is coming soon to better support your CAE application development needs.
CEETRON Envision now boasts a built-in bridge with HOOPS Exchange, adding its industry-leading support for CAD data translation of 30+ formats to your CAE workflows. Envision web now has configurable UI operators for customizing user interactions within a 3D view.
CEETRON Mesh has released its parallel surface meshing, offering a divide-and-conquer approach with up to 10x speed improvement on 16 cores.
As part of our goals to promote CEETRON Access as a universal FEM data structure, we have set up a plugin framework. This will allow for better support for custom readers and third-party contributions.
2024 will see plenty of exciting changes coming to CEETRON products. CEETRON Envision will be enhancing its preprocessing support. This includes CAD-mesh mappings, allowing users to define boundary conditions directly on the CAD model and FEA-specific visualizations.
CEETRON Solve further optimizes its preconditioning on hex meshes. This is an area for improvement we have noticed and are committed to improving.
For CEETRON Access, we are planning support for ANSYS DPF and VTK VTU Reading.
Partner Spotlight
During our summit, we also took the opportunity to highlight our partnerships with nTop and OPTIMAD. Our work with these fantastic companies represents our commitment to building Strategic Technology Partnerships.
Are you looking for component solutions to your CAE application development problems? Get in touch with us to talk about our CEETRON Summit, the toolkits we offer, or simply ask a question by clicking here or following the link below!
