Issue #1,102 | Inside the Business of CAD | 28 June 2021
David Stein: I’ve been preoccupied with non-CAD work for too long and only recently checked in with your newsletter to catch up on things.
The more I read about big-name CAD producers, the more it seems they chase bigger spenders, rather than focus on customer needs, especially small and mid-sized customers, who can’t justify selling their homes, kids, and pets to buy super high-end hardware and insanely expensive products.
Catchy names, rehearsed speeches, coached hand gestures, and overblown claims during keynotes are boring. It’s become like CGI [computer generated imagery] in action movies: nobody jumps in their seats anymore, because they know it isn’t real. Keynotes are all aimed at the executives, not the engineers and designers.
I never rooted enough for the underdogs; many have come and gone. But I hope to see a new generation of CAD products priced lower than a new home roof. I’ll gladly try something that can model a house deck, or custom-furniture piece making, if it's inexpensive (or even free).
But right now I’d rather draw my 3D plans on paper than pay thousands of dollars. I don’t need to collaborate with a marketing team, or to print parts in outer space — just basic machine shop stuff, the people they seem to have forgotten about.
Ralph Grabowski: You are seeing this frantic behavior because some publicly-owned CAD vendors are getting financially desperate as they run out of revenue boosters in what is a mature market. We saw prices increasing steadily through a variety of tactics:
Some CAD vendors forced users off one-time permanent licenses and onto all-the-time subscription fees.
They skyrocketed subscription prices for big enterprise customers, who typically renegotiate licence fees every third year.
They increased the effective cost of networking licenses by changing them from floating to per-person.
In the last fiscal year, they received a one-time big bang by being allowed to report deferred subscription revenue differently, in a way that makes it look like they goosed revenues during the pandemic.
One editor, who has his pulse on the industry more than me, thinks the next step is consumption-based use. The more cloud-CPUs your drawing needs, the more you pay — possibly through tokens, which some CAD vendors have already implemented in a limited way (such as for renderings and generative modeling).
In a perverted way, the money grab make sense, as certain CAD vendors have painted themselves into a corner. After convincing themselves that the cloud was to be the Next Big Thing, they forgot that they are the ones footing the bill 24/7 to Amazon AWS. Now they are scrambling to figure out how to cover their sky-high server bills. The answer: squeeze the customer.
CAD vendors who are keeping their software on the desktop are smart. They don’t incur the AWS tax.
David Stein: Oddly enough, I left the world of CAD (add-on developer, actually) for IT infrastructure, and then cloud — mostly Azure and the Microsoft stack. It’s interesting to me that for all the touting of “consumption-based pricing” by Microsoft that they don’t follow their mantra completely. There still are upfront costs like Security Center. Azure Log Analytics features, such as Change Tracking, incur a node fee.
I think that both markets, CAD and cloud, desperately need more competition. It’s shaping up to be like the big three TV networks from the ’50s to the ’70s.
Ralph Grabowski: Big shifts promoted by CAD vendors today inevitably become minor components tomorrow. There was a time around 2000 when we were so bombarded with collaboration-as-the-future marketing that we began referring to it as “the C-word.”
The ceo of a CAD firm one said something along the lines of, “If you’re not giving me money I don’t want you as a customer.” He did not seem to understand that it goes both ways: if CAD vendors aren’t giving value for money, then customers don’t want them a suppliers (cf. the Revit letter).
And in Other News
Open Design Alliance is looking for companies to work on a general purpose scan-to-BIM SDK [software development kit] that would do the following tasks:
Convert point cloud data to segmented meshes
Remove interference objects
Classify meshes into objects like walls, doors, and windows
Convert classified objects to BIM formats like IFC and RVT
Even though some CAD vendors have already implemented scan-to-BIM functions on their own, this collaborative effort is meant to provide it faster and more cheaply than doing it from scratch. Members will write the source code and determine the usage fee. More info about the initiative is at opendesign.com/scan-to-bim.
Epson is launching six new models this year of its SureColor T-Series inkjet printers in 24-, 36- and 44-inch sizes. First up is the T7770D (US$6,945) 44"-wide printer that holds two rolls of paper, a take-up reel, and an optional stacker. It prints monochrome CAD drawings at speeds of up to 1,400 square feet/hour.
Issue #1,101 | Inside the Business of CAD | 21 June 2021
ZwSoft is pivoting from traditional CAD software to an all-in-one CAx platform meant for design work in both manufacturing and buildings. During its annual user conference held last month online (see figure below), the company gave attendees initial details of its long-range plans.
Stage of the ZwWorld 2021 online conference
ZwSoft’s “all-in-one CAx” phrase appeared two years ago. Initially, it involved integrating CAE [computer-aided engineering] applications into the company’s Zw3D MCAD program through a new ZwSIM platform. The first solver was for electromagnetic simulation.
ZwSoft is now expanding the meaning of All-in-One CAx to be “model-defined and data-driven collaboration,” and to be developed over quite a few years. It has been tagged “Project Wukong,” possibly named after the fast, zoomorphic Sun Wukong character in a Chinese novel from 1592, Journey to the West.
More specifically, Project Wukong is ZwSoft’s next-gen 3D CAD platform meant to expand its traditional market of general and mechanical CAD to AEC [engineering, architecture, construction]. ZwSoft plans to reorganize the data, technology, and functions found in their three base programs — ZwCAD, Zw3D, and ZwSIM — to a single platform (see figure below).
Overview of ZwSoft’s future
The company’s three base programs currently are the following:
ZwCAD. The 19-year-old ZwCAD 2D/3D DWG editor is like many other AutoCAD workalikes on the market. It had been based on IntelliCAD and uses the ACIS kernel, and now the company says it is again developing its own kernel.
Zw3D. The solids-surfacing CAD/CAM program began in 1999 as Varimetrix, better known as “VX” and has its own Overdrive kernel. It was acquired by ZwSoft in 2010, and continues to be based in Florida, with co-founder Mark Vorwaller still heading it up under the title of president of ZwSoft America.
ZwSIM. The platform for simulation was launched in 2018 with a geometry engine, pre-processor, solver, and post-processor. ZwSIM so far handles structural and electromagnetic simulation, and is due to receive acoustic, thermal, fluid, and optical solvers in the future.
About Project Wukong
Project Wukong involves big changes in how ZwSoft develops software:
Files become databases
Serial workflows become parallel ones
Offline collaboration becomes real-time
At first, it seemed to me that conference presenters were saying that Project Wukong would become the future of all ZwSoft software. Then the lead developer stated that Project Wukong will be the company’s new cross-disciplinary platform and that its primary purpose is to expand ZwSoft’s market into BIM. ZwCAD-Zw3D-ZwSIM would continue on the desktop, and would gain links to software running on the Wukong platform.
ZwSoft plans that Project Wukong-based programs offer the following functions:
Concurrent execution of cross-disciplinary applications, including BIM, shipbuilding, and aerospace design. (ZwSoft calls all these verticals “AEC.”)
Multiple clients accessing a single data source.
Cloud-native (private and public) databases that “will not rely on local file storage.”
Top-down product lifecycle management.
Large-scale assembly modeling that can handle tens of millions of parts (needed more for BIM than MCAD).
Programming APIs that are more extensible than those from competitor CAD systems.
A hundred programmers have been working on the Wukong platform for a year now, which is scheduled to be “realized” three years from now. (See figure below.) A demo of Wukong was not given during the presentation.
Timeline for Project Wukong
ZwSoft plans to have BIM as the first application running on Project Wukong. It is meant to handle design in the areas of massing, structures, HVAC [heating, ventilation, air conditioning], and electro-mechanics. More distant plans include pre-fab design, and construction planning and management. The initial release of “ZwBIM” won’t, however, be ready for five years.
Zwsoft promises to keep updating its file-based desktop software “for as many years as it serves your collective needs.” In any case, file-based software gives ZwSoft a fall-back position, should unforeseen roadblocks change the path it had planned to take towards its future (c.f. Solidworks V6).
Zwsoft Stats
Earlier this year, the company went public with an IPO on the Shanghai STAR exchange, China’s NASDAQ for science and technology firms. From what I can tell, ZwSoft has a market capitalization of approximately US$5 billion at a very high P/E [price to earnings] ratio of 210 (20-25 is considered normal). Bloomberg documents that ZwSoft had 2021Q1 revenues of US$13 million (approx.).
During the online conference the company provided us with no financial picture, other than to report that it spends 30% of revenues on R&D [research and development]. ZwSoft indicated it is interested in looking at acquisitions.
The 1,000 who took in the online conference learned these other statistics:
900,000 users
90 countries with customers
Annual growth rates:
2018 - 39%
2019 - 42%
2020 - 26%
260 business partners and 200 application developers
What Ralph Grabowski Thinks
As with a few MCAD programs like Solidworks and Inventor, the doomsday clock for desktop-based ZwCAD and Zw3D has begun counting down. One presenter stated that the timeframe to continue developing Zw3D in parallel with Wukong is 10-15 years. This discouraging news is tempered by the good news that ZwSoft sells permanent licenses for its desktop software.
The Project Wukong strategy is not uncommon among a few large (c.f. PTC) and new (c.f. Onshape) CAD vendors nowadays. It is, however, a task that’s unusual for a medium-sized (defined by me as around a million users) firm to take on, given the immense scope of work involved. Extrapolating, it could cost ZwSoft 600 person-years to program the first release of “ZwBIM.” Perhaps the IPO [initial public offering] is funding Wukong development.
ZwSoft’s timeline for releasing an initial version of their new BIM software is five years from now, a long time given our industry’s changing priorities during such a period — never mind the additional years that will be required for ZwSoft to add catch-up functions. Here is how I imagine the programming is being scheduled:
By 2026: ZwBIM attains basic BIM functions
By ????: Attains advanced BIM functions
By ????: Adds the BIM functions competitors added since 2021
On the other hand, ZwSoft benefits from learning from competitors the function needed by today’s BIM programs, such as intersections of multi ply walls and slabs, and facades of irregular arrayed shapes. It won’t be wasting time stumbling down dead ends.
BIM in China. The American Revit dominantes in China. From Chinese government-agency documents I perused, there appears to be a desire for China-developed BIM authoring software. There are, however, none in BIM (as best as I could determine), other than support software like project management and add-ons for localized disciplines.
For example, ZwSoft’s closest competitor is Caxa. It has a general/electrical CAD program and an American-developed MCAD system (IronCAD), but no BIM aspiration. Having the field to itself, ZwSoft has plenty of incentive to build BIM.
When the Open Design Alliance first announced it was creating APIs to access, edit, and create data for Revit and IFC files, I wondered if CAD vendors might jump on the chance to develop a Revit of their own. In the years since, we’ve seen lots of CAD systems incorporating RVT/IFC data handling, including ZwCAD. But no one has built a BIM system from scratch, as ZwSoft plans to do. It’s a tough job.
Going beyond Project Wukong, ZwSoft has a vision of becoming the world’s leading CAx software provider. The hitch to this Guangzhou company’s ambition, however, is the lowered-enthusiasm some international markets have for services developed in China.
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CAD Software Solutions’ SparePartsPlace Toolkit for Autodesk Inventor v2021.4 optimizes calculation times of surface and combined solid/surface models.
I read with interest the article on engineering math by Gustav Näslund. I guess he does not know about our software GrafiCalc that virtually eliminates tedious mathematical calculations from the product design process. GrafiCalc is trusted by thousands of users worldwide. - Shyamal Roy, owner GEOMATE Company, www.graficalc.com
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To me, engineering math software is very much associated with CAD and all the other engineering tools in my box, so I was delighted to see the review.
I did not know about Maple Flow and SMath Studio. Mathcad is great, but I’m still using a copy from 20 years ago. The complexity of my calculations has not changed over the past 20 years, so thousands of dollars of additional fees for unneeded features are not justified. Collaboration with others is not critical to me.
I’ll be experimenting with Maple and SMath. If they work, I’ll encourage others to go that route too. - Chuck Moore
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It’s nice to see SMath referenced in your publication. This is an excellent free program that I’ve been using for over a decade. I written hundreds of programs using it. Programs can be written to incorporate units of measurement. Arrays can be written with the column values containing units.
There are a few minor hiccups, but these can easily be worked around. The only other issue with it is that it is Russian and for political reasons, this may preclude the use of in for some businesses.
I’ve attached a bit of a clip of some of the code. It can get a lot more complicated and the units are taken care of directly.
The units in the answers are provided by SMath, based on the unit values of the variables automatically. I display the answers in both Imperial and metric. I'm a bit of a dinosaur; I work in Imperial and metric (SI), but think in Imperial; the metric values are for those that work in metric. - Dik Coates, P. Eng.
The editor responds: Me, too. Those of us of a certain age.
Most products sold in Canada are still Imperial, even though we have been officially metric since 1970. So, I asked my kids’ high school teachers to include Imperial instruction — no-can-do.
I’ve come to realize that imperial units are human units — inch, foot, yard relate to the human body, and are closer to the kind of e*-scaling that is common in nature. (Metric units and their power-of-10 scaling are inhuman, IMHO.) Even carpentry is easier: half of 3/8" is 3/16"; half of 37mm is who-knows-what.
*) e = Euler’s constant = 2.718281828459045235…
Notable Quotable
“Reducing our dependence on the Internet is a good goal. Kind of like aiming to smoke fewer cigarettes each day.” - Ralph Grabowski
Thank You, Readers
Thank you to readers who donate towards the operation of upFront.eZine:
Marco Lucini of ProgeSoft (small company donation)
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Issue #1,100 | Inside the Business of CAD | 14 June 2021
Written by Gustav Näslund
Mathematics software for engineers is not something I am especially familiar with. When I took calculus, we had no calculators, and in my field of study at the time, transportation engineering, we tended to work with simple trigonometry, rather than advanced equations.
So, reader Gustav Näslund suggested running an article about the software available in the engineering math editor space.
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Software for engineering math are not strictly CAD, but I think nonetheless that they are essential and powerful tools for design engineers to perform and document engineering calculations.
I think this class of software is not as well known, nor used, as much as it should be in our industry, which is why I would like raise awareness of them.
If you are not familiar with this kind of software, think of it as a free form digital notepad that does calculations interactively. It supports units of measurement and live links between all variables and equations. The figure below is typical:
Math software doing calculations and units conversion
In general, this kind of software lets you add equations, text, and images in a freeform manner, and you can rearrange them as you like. All equations are live-linked, so that they update their values when something changes.
Because you work in a paper-like format, the format is self-documenting. When you are done, just save it as a PDF file, and you have your calculations documented.
The equations support all units of measurements. This means, for example, that we can mix imperial and metric units in equations without fear. The mandatory reference here is to the NASA Mars Climate Orbiter debacle; see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter.
I find that the programs have a very low threshold for getting started, and run fast, so they are suitable for even the simplest calculations — never mind the most advanced.
Math Software Packages
The figure below is of SMath Studio; MathCAD and Maple Flow look similar.
SMath Studio from Andrey Ivashov
MathCAD has long been a player in engineering math editor field, 35 years in the business. It was taken over by PTC in 2006, and then received a total makeover as MathCAD Prime in 2011.
The latest version of MathCAD is available now by subscription only, in the ballpark of $1,000/year for a commercial licence. Educational licenses are available. www.mathcad.com and en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathcad
Maple Flow is a very recently released (2021) direct competitor to MathCAD from Canadian company MapleSoft. It appears to me to be aimed directly as a competitor to MathCAD, as it has a very similar interface and works in the same way.
Maple Flow seems to be priced at $2,390 for a single perpetual commercial license. Educational licenses are available. maplesoft.com/products/mapleflow
SMath Studio is a free alternative created by Andrey Ivashov, first released in 2006. It has capabilities that are very similar to the original MathCAD, before its remake as MathCAD Prime.
Being free, it is not as advanced as MathCAD, but for 90% of engineers it will be just what they want (and need). It has a thriving community that creates plug-ins and so on, and is funded through donations. www.smath.com
[Gustav Näslund owns GN Tech of Sweden, and specializes in product development and mechanical design. www.gntech.se/en]
And in Other News
The next release of NX is shipping later this week on June 18, while Solid Edge 2022 is scheduled to become available later this year in October.
In other Siemens news, the company acquired Nextflow Software of France for its meshless simulation technology. Smooth-Particle Hydrodynamics does particle-based computational fluid dynamics for gas and liquid flows. www.nextflow-software.com
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Radica Software’s Electra Cloud schematic electrical design software now exports BOMs (bills of material) directly to OpenBOM for report creation, with further links to accounting systems. A future upgrade will export data from OpenBOM back to Electra and its Vecta.io SVG [scalable vector graphics] editor. radicasoftware.com
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3D Systems has divested itself of its on-demand additive manufacturing service, named On Demand Manufacturing, for $82 million to Trilantic, which promptly renamed it Quickparts. Details at schnitgercorp.com/?p=18523
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Jon Peddie Research reports that the GPU market last year grew by 39% to 199 million units. The market share between suppliers remains unchanged:
Though well outside of my profession, I find FEA [finite element analysis] interesting. Does Coreform run on GPUs [graphics processing units]? I searched their forum for the term, but there was only one unrelated result.
How does the speed of their software compare to competitors that do run on GPUs? Many FEA software packages are optimized to run on nVidia GPUs: nvidia.com/en-us/gpu-accelerated-applications.
It would seem that if their core calculations are more efficient on CPUs, writing the code to get their software to run on GPUs would be a further advantage. - Peter Lawton Affiliated Engineers, Inc.
Greg Vernon replies: Currently, we only execute on CPUs, but we’ve architected our algorithms and code to be maximally parallelize-able. GPU-compute is definitely on our roadmap.
A large bulk of our compute time is spent within the linear and nonlinear solvers provided by the open-source PETSc project, which is currently developing GPU support. See mcs.anl.gov/petsc/features/gpus.html.
We’re currently focusing on classes of problems that have [in the past] required incredible amounts of compute resources, but rather than throw more resources (more CPUs and GPUs) at the problem, we’re consistently finding that throwing better math at the problem is giving us orders of magnitude faster solves.
I like to think of it in terms of Exascale* ambitions. If the point of Exascale compute is to solve problems, then there are two ways to achieve this:
Build faster/larger parallel computers
Use better mathematics that make the problem smaller for existing computers
We’re taking the second approach! -Greg Vernon, director of product management Coreform
*) Exascale = computing systems capable of calculating 10¹⁸ floating point operations per second, or more.
Mr Lawton responds: The two approaches are not mutually exclusive, of course, so Corefrom may consider using both — the outcome will be even greater advantage over competitors.
It sounds, too, like the math they are improving requires a different coding team than would be required to get Coreform to run on CUDA, so the two improvements can happen in parallel, once you have the right personnel.
Notable Quotable
“He’s at home recovering for a few days. He saw an offensive tweet.” - Management Speak
Thank You, Readers
Thank you to readers who donate to the operation of upFront.eZine:
Martin van der Roest: “One of those decisions that is a no-brainer. I really appreciate your perspectives and contribution to our industry. Thank you!”
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Issue #1,099 | Inside the Business of CAD | 7 June 2021
Nearly all analysis software works the same way: break up 3D models into many small pieces, and then do an analysis on each small element to find out when the model might fail. The concept goes back Boris Galerkin, who mused that just because something can be proven physically doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be proven mathematically.
And so in 1915 Mr Galerkin developed an approximation method using differential equations, following which Richard Courant developed the finite element method as a special case of Galerkin’s Method. That was 1943; today, FEA [finite element analysis] is overwhelmingly the most common form of model analysis.
IGA [iso-geometric analysis] is a different way of splitting 3D solids into those chunks before performing analyses on models. Mike Scott, Derek Thomas, and Kevin Tew pioneered R&D on IGA under the name of Isogeometrx LLC. IGA is based on U-splines (unstructured splines, patented by Mr Thomas). The company rebranded as Coreform when Matt Sederberg came on board in 2016 to commercialize IGA.
IGA and FEA applied to a part: 1,000 elements vs 1,000,000 elements
Then about a year ago, Coreform developed a new IGA formulation, generalizing the finite cell method. The idea is to adjust simulation speed and accuracy, coarser or finer, according to the needs of each stage of the product development process. By decreasing meshing time and eliminating steps, Coreform speeds up design and analysis. (See figure below.)
Coreform software speeding up design and analysis
Coreform IGA handles both material and geometric nonlinearities, as well as nonlinear constraints, including contacts. For a given degree p, the bandwidth is the same but the fill-in is greater for smooth functions. Most customers define their own subroutines and material models through Julia, an open-source programming language. See julialang.org.
The following figure shows how Coreform fits into the panoply of FEA programs:
The place of Coreform IGS among analysis software
Before U-Splines
Before co-founding Coreform, Mr Sederberg commercialized the T-splines technology developed by his father, Tom Sederberg. T-splines were an improvement over meshing, which usually limits meshes to rectangles; T-splines meant that meshes could come to a stop before covering the entire surface. (See figure below.)
A simple T-spline (image source SourceForge)
One catch is that it takes a lot more computing power, but today’s computer can handle it. Another, more serious catch is that unlike U-splines, T-splines were never invented to be used for analysis.
The stand-alone T-Splines software was bought by Autodesk in 2011, which integrated the technology into its Inventor and Fusion 360 programs – much to the disappointment of customers who had been using the CAD-agnostic version of T-Splines.
Cubit and IGA
Coreform offers two software products:
Coreform Cubit is the mesher using hexagonal and square meshes (see figure below). It cleans up poorly-made CAD models, and everything can be automated with Python scripting. With coarse bounding-box analysis, the result from Cubit is nearly instant.
Course bounding box and detailed adaptive quadrature
The free version Coreform Cubit Learn for non-commercial use limits exports to 50,000 elements.
Coreform IGA implements IGA with linear and nonlinear solvers to solve static and dynamic physics made of nonlinear materials and contacts. Input files are in human-readable JSON [JavaScript object notation] format. Subroutines are implemented in Julia.
Visualizing IGA results inside ParaView open-source visualization software at www.paraview.org
Coreform is especially useful for complex assemblies. The company is interested in working with early adopters to understand their needs.
Q&A
Q: Traditional FEA is many decades old and is very well known. How would one go about explaining IGA to management that is comfortable with FEA, but has no idea what a spline is?
A: Here’s what I tell them: Every traditional FEA mesh is a spline. However, it has historically been so intractably difficult to build “high-order, smooth splines on unstructured meshes” that it hasn’t been worth encoding traditional FEA meshes as a spline.
Any practical, commercially-viable simulation tool needs to have unstructured meshes; real world parts are unstructured and complex.
Academics have known for years the benefits that smooth splines provide in FEA. See the section titled “The piecewise polynomial spaces” at the bottom of page 8 of doi.org/10.1090/S0002-9904-1973-13351-8. The last sentence in the paper reads, “But the actual construction of the psi^i is genuinely an open problem,” and refers to the problem of creating smooth, high-order splines on unstructured meshes. U-splines are a solution to this problem.
Smoothness is often referred to as “continuity.” We would say that traditional finite elements are “continuous (C^0)” while IGA is “smooth (C^1, C^2, C^3...).”
In fact, for special cases, we already use smooth splines in FEA, we just give the elements different names like “Euler-Bernoulli beam element” or “Hermite shell element.” However, even these haven’t been recognized or implemented as splines.
What IGA does is implement the finite element method upon the recognition that all meshes are splines. This means that certain critical parts of the finite element method are generalized, such as integration and assembly. Critically, IGA is FEA, but with a whole new set of rich mathematical theory and tools that are more effective at solving FEA problems.
Q: How much of Coreform is based on T-splines?
A: T-splines are not part of the Coreform IGA solution. Our U-splines are a general form of spline designed to support simulation.
T-splines technology was a stepping stone to U-splines. Coreform’s technical founders learned from the shortcomings and positives of T-splines when they began developing our U-spline technology.
Q: Can we use user-defined materials (UMAT) in Coreform?
A: Yes, we have a fully defined user interface that leverages Julia. It can handle user-defined materials and other subroutines for assembly, element definition, and so on.
Q: Is there a discontinuous Galerkin function in Coreform?
A: We do leverage some techniques that are closely related to the discontinuous Galerkin method [which converts continuous functions to discrete ones].
Q: Solving time?
A: We use the open source PETSc [portable, extensible toolkit for scientific computation] parallel solver library. We have 15x fewer elements and 20x fewer degrees of freedom for a typical part, so it will solve much faster. However, with the same number of elements, we are slower because of the setup time.
Q: Why is accuracy per degree-of-freedom [DOF] an important quantity to measure/report? As the stiffness matrix gets denser for spline basis, wouldn’t the solve time also increase, despite the smaller number of DOFs?
A: This is highly problem dependent, but as the complexity increases (such as due to nonlinear materials, geometry, contacts, and dynamics) the disparity between Coreform IGA solve times and traditional FEA increases, in that Coreform IGA is much, much faster.
Q: Do you have the ability to report the uncertainty in the calculation of the results?
A: We do not yet support uncertainties in computed quantities.
Q: Does Coreform IGA model [analyze] contacts between parts?
A: We are actively developing contact capabilities. New capabilities will be rolled out with every release. We have a fully-defined (self-) contact algorithm that can be deployed over both body-fitted and immersed contact surfaces.
Q: Can Coreform simulate any kind of partial differential equations set by the user? Not only stress mechanics or Navier-Stokes fluid dynamics, but also flow fields of electrolyzer systems, for example?
A: You can add additional physics through our user-defined interface. Our code is designed to be highly customizable, as this has been a requirement by all our customers.
Q: Is MPI [message passing interface] solver (for parallel computing) supported in Coreform?
A: Yes, it is fully parallelized.
Q: Geometry is obviously very important, but I am sure you are aware that materials’ parameters have been calibrated based upon element technology for traditional solvers, so that certainly applies to IGA. Users will have to look carefully at their material properties. Any comment about this?
A: We have quite a bit of experience porting advanced (often proprietary) material models from commercial FEA codes to Coreform IGA. We have never encountered a situation where special techniques were used in addition to what is commonly used in FEA.
Q: Is there Bezier extraction in IGA?
A: We use Bezier extraction extensively in Coreform IGA. In fact, the U-spline technology is defined in terms of Bezier extraction.
Q: BEM [boundary element method] can have even smaller DOFs for isotropic homogeneous models. However, the resulting stiffness matrix isn’t sparse anymore. How about IGA and sparsity patterns?
A: The sparsity patterns for IGA are exactly the same as p-FEM except there may be more fill-in due to smoothness. This means that the matrices are still sparse, just less sparse than traditional FEA. The matrix is the same size as the number of degrees of freedom in the model. For an IGA solution that has 1000x fewer DOFs it’s okay that this smaller matrix has a higher relative density.
Q: Can we directly use CAD files (such as Solidworks) in Coreform?
A: Coreform Cubit includes data importers that support most CAD inputs. Some of these importers are free with a standard Cubit license, while others are licensed separately. See coreform.com/products/translators for details.
Q: Is there a way to improve the quality of the display of the results, such as smoothing out the results?
A: Yes. The ability to see the results directly on the underlying CAD model is literally days away.
Q: Is the process during decomposition using multiple adjacent subdomains, and using same or different material— Is it a single mesh or multiple meshes?
A: Both scenarios are fully supported.
Q: Can we solve fluid-structure interaction problems (FSI) in Coreform?
A: We don’t currently have fluids/FSI capabilities, but it is on our roadmap.
Q: Heat transfer?
A: That is the next simulation we plan to implement. We never implement a feature without a customer request.
Q: Any plans to support a “Coreform IGA Learn” version?
A: Yes! It will be very similar to Coreform Cubit Learn. Stay tuned.
Q: May I know the immersed technology behind Coreform IGA? Is that adaptive quadrature or reparameterization?
A: We accommodate both workflows. One can be preferred over the other depending on the application. The immersed technology is a generalization of the finite cell method.
Q: What advantages do you see using Coreform IGA over known open-source IGA solvers considering an academic environment? Sadly, we have to take care of possible fees, etc. at academia.
A: Contact us and we can discuss fees.
We’re committed to supporting the open-source community:
We added Bezier extraction to the open-source Exodus mesh format so that Cubit can communicate IGA’s spline meshes between open-source solvers, such as MOOSE. See github.com/gsjaardema/seacas/issues/189.
We believe there will always be a space for open-source IGA solvers, and that it is mutually beneficial for Coreform to support open-source solvers.
Q: How do you suggest forming an IGA structural model based on point clouds of geometry (based on measurements of parts from something like LIDAR)? What would be the workflow in the context of Cubit?
A: That is of great interest to us. It is not a clean way to build a model. For a point cloud, is a point inside or outside? You still need to build triangulations but it does not need to be clean.
A solution for CAD vendors stuck on Amazon’s cloud-rental hamster wheel: “Analysis of 50 public software companies finds that repatriating workloads from public cloud infrastructure could help them reduce their cloud spend by 50%.” (Sarah Wang and Martin Casado)
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After burning through $2+ billion in funding from SoftBank and other venture capital firms, construction startup Katerra last week told its 8,000 employees that after six years in operation it is shutting down. The company wanted to revolutionize building construction through off-site modular-panel factories and lots of technology. katerra.com/vision
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NCG CAM Solutions releases NCG CAM v18.0 with new features like
Create a patch from two 3D curves
3D tool guide
Horizontal area passes from outside to inside
Waterline offset passes (see figure below)
Another new function, Trim Surfaces to a Boundary, will be added later. As the company says, “Perpetual Licensing (This will NOT change).” Download the demo version from www.ncgcam.com/demo-download (after registration).
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Precast Software Engineering is now a subsidiary of Allplan, operating under the name Allplan Software Engineering. www.allplan.com/us_en
Letters to the Editor
Re: A 2021 View of the PLM Market
Here are 171 programs that claim to be PLM at capterra.com/product-lifecycle-management-software: “Find the best Product Lifecycle Management Software for your business. Compare product reviews and features to build your list.”
Can you imagine giving an employee this task from this list?
PLM was never to be this. Those that created it, American Motors, started with a drawing archive. Today, they are trying to manage engineering documentation. The major programs are associative and create a nightmare for document control. The Info-techs have devised many unworkable processes to solve this problem.
Boeing’s engineering was taken over by Dassault’s Catia 5 PLM, the result was the failed MBE [model-based engineering]. They eliminated the drafting group and document control without preparing the staff or doing a test run, all cold turkey.
In the past, all documentation was controlled by drawings (part and assembly drawings) The drawing package defined the complete project and stood alone. PLM’s efforts to take over document control has made a mess of engineering. But it was just part of a perfect storm! - Joe Brouwer
The editor replies: As PLM is meant to do all things, then all things belong to PLM:
P = product = everything that ever was made, is made, and will be made
L = lifecyle = the duration of every product, from before it was designed until after it is torn apart by the recycling biz
M = Management = managing it all with software and, more recently, using IoT for feedback.
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Part of the problem with the PLM market seems to be that it is compelled to make up new names for the same thing. I’m sure that PLM, PDM, MRP, ERP, and MES have some differences, but all appear to do the same thing.
Or maybe they don’t all do the same thing, but they all — no matter what they started as — now claim to be the total solution to running businesses.
My direct experience of all of them is limited to the ways they impact the engineering world, but it’s always interesting to listen to a CAD company explain that their engineering software is now ready to take care of your accounting system, and vice-versa. - Jess Davis
The editor replies: That is the ulterior motive behind CAD and other software vendors pushing their PLM: one software to rule your whole business, reaping subscription fees until the day your business ends.
Notable Quotable
“Apple is second to none in this field, perpetuating an obscene throwaway culture, candy-coated with neat videos and communication extolling their green posture. (A note in passing: a lack of further investigation into this is a major journalistic failure.)” - Frederic Filloux
Thank You, Readers
Thank you to our readers who donate towards the operation of upFront.eZine:
Jim Wright: “Thanks for your efforts!”
Anthony Mirante
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