Tech Soft 3D offers a new line of toolkits designed to fully support computer aided engineering (CAE) workflows.
Comprising four components, the CEETRON suite of solutions enables software engineers to accelerate CAE application development at every stage of the process. "The new toolkits bring together technology from Ceetron AS, Visual Kinematics (VKI) and Tech Soft 3D to provide the industry's first complete platform for pre-processing, solving and post-processing of CAE data, giving customers such as ANSYS, Elise GmBH, DNV, SimScale and nTopology one strategic partner to work with for their CAE applications," said a company spokesperson.
"Bringing together the technologies acquired in 2020 to create a complete suite of CAE toolkits that connects with HOOPS and Polygonica is not only very exciting for us, but is also in line with our mission to empower our customers to create the most sophisticated applications and products using powerful, integrated and easy-to-use component technologies," said Ron Fritz, CEO of Tech Soft 3D. "It has been especially rewarding to see the results of our successful acquisitions, not only from a product standpoint, but also to see our teams so well integrated and working towards the same goal. This is a milestone for our company, and we anticipate that our customers will be very happy with these new tools and the ability to relate to a single partner for all their CAE technology needs."
CAE Workflows
"Throughout a typical CAE workflow, each step requires specific technologies, where the use of market-hardened toolkits is highly beneficial," said the spokesperson. "When looking at the set-up stage, HOOPS Exchange is the market's best-in-class data access component, capable of bringing into play geometry from 30+ CAD formats."
In many cases, the design needs healing prior to meshing: Polygonica is the ideal component to prepare tessellations for CAE. The CEETRON toolkit line takes the relay at that point, with CEETRON Mesh yielding both 2D and 3D meshes adapted to simulation purposes. When it comes to the calculations themselves, the CEETRON Solve SDK is an extensive framework to formulate finite element equations, assemble them into a global system and eventually solve them through high-performance parallel (SMP) linear algebra.
The workflow ends with the analysis and sharing of the solver's results analyzed by the expert eye of an engineer. With CEETRON Envision, Tech Soft 3D provides a palette of technologies to handle data extraction, display model generation, optimized rendering on desktop and native web, as well as data sharing and reporting.
Finally, the CAE workflow is also supported by general purpose technologies, such as visualization, interoperability and automation. The new CEETRON Toolkits provide off-the-shelf solutions for each of these to help CAE developers reduce their development and workflow building efforts.
"Few SDKs are as user friendly as the CEETRON Toolkits and provide such a high level of development efficiency," said the spokesperson. "With the same lines of code, developers can achieve reading capability of 30+ industry standard CAE formats and are able to write out 10+ formats to convey results to other packages. Last but not least, the toolkits are developed and supported by a highly responsive team of experienced developers."
"TRANSVALOR has a successful 25 year-long relationship with Ceetron, and this strategic partnership contributes efficiently to the solutions that TRANSVALOR develops for its customers," said Stephane Heitz, CEO at TRANSVALOR. "It has been a key element in our historic leadership in material forming simulation software worldwide. We are looking forward to exploring the new possibilities now that Ceetron is a Tech Soft 3D company."
Ceetron Envision
Ceetron Envision is an all-in-one CAE analysis and visualization platform that provides a complete framework specialized in CAE data analysis and visualization. It includes data processing, rendering, automation and sharing, and is available for browser-based web applications and more classical desktop ones. Envision allows developers to seamlessly dig into the large CAE datasets produced by solvers and provide interactive and automated analysis tools for expert engineering. Mechanical engineers can also share their analysis work through a wide variety of visualization outputs: HTML files, AR/VR headsets, Microsoft documents, interactive PPTs, etc.
Key features of Ceetron Envision include:
- High-speed extraction tools
- CPU and memory-optimized CAE data management
- Cutting planes, isosurfaces, isovolumes, particle traces
- Animations
- Length and history plots
- Powerful and easy-to-develop APIs
- Shader-based OpenGL and WebGL
- Desktop and in-browser apps
- Universal display model sharing format
- Lightweight storage of key interactive models with results
- Enhanced engineering efficiency
- Embeddable interactive models for websites, Word, PPT, HTML.
Ceetron Access
Ceetron Access provides the interoperability necessary to open closed simulation applications to the global CAE ecosystem. Through a unified access to nearly all CAE file formats, Ceetron Access is a key building block for CAE interconnections and therefore, workflows. "Unlike other SDKs, Ceetron Access does not try to force data into a particular paradigm; it simply reads data from the native file and stores it in memory in a universal model that can be interrogated," said the spokesperson.
Key features of Ceetron Access include:
- Import of 30+ of the most popular CAE formats: Ansys, Abaqus, Nastran, Hypermesh, Fluent, openFoam, etc.
- Export to 10+ standard CAE formats
- High performance with efficient memory usage.
Ceetron Mesh
Ceetron Mesh works on conforming tessellations to deliver fail-free automatic mesh generations. It provides meshes in 2D and 3D with control on mesh size, geometric precision and element quality. The surface mesher generates triangles and quads, and the volume mesher provides tetrahedrons and mixed pyramid/hex meshes. Furthermore, parabolic and cubic elements can be generated. The Ceetron Mesh SDK provides a complete set of control options for mesh size-both isotropic and anisotropic-as well as for element quality. Finally, the toolkit is delivered with source code to illustrate how it can be interfaced to popular geometry kernels such as Siemens Parasolid, Spatial ACIS and OpenCASCADE. Along the same lines, a bridge to HOOPS Exchange further expands the range of CAD input formats.
Key features of Ceetron Mesh include:
- Broad element support
- Extensive set of control options
- CAD integrations with Parasolid, ACIS, OpenCASCADE and all formats supported by HOOPS Exchange.
Ceetron Solve
Ceetron Solve is a high-performance platform for building finite element method (FEM) solvers. Its components allow defining element-level contributions, and handle global assembly as well as linear solving. It allows developers to model at element level and obtain FEM contributions of a given element and includes a built-in library of material models. In addition, the toolkit tackles the assembly of the local matrix and vector contributions, as well as the pure math needed for linear system and eigenvalue problem solving. The toolkits are built on a high level of coarse-grained data distribution on shared-memory parallel architectures, and the algorithms are continuously benchmarked on real-life simulations and optimized for memory and CPU to remain ahead of the competition.
Key features of Ceetron Solve include:
- Local physics: Define physical models at element level and obtain FEM contributions of the element
- Global solving: Equation system assembly, linear equation solving and eigenvalue problem resolution
- High level of coarse-grained SMP, including efficient out-of-core solving, best-in-class iterative and direct solvers and a high-speed AMLS eigensolver.
The Ceetron Toolkits are the culmination of technologies from Ceetron and VKI, which Tech Soft 3D acquired in 2020.
For more information contact:
Tech Soft 3D
1567 SW Chandler Ave., Ste. 100
Bend, OR 97702
541-385-3000
www.techsoft3d.com