Altair's 2022.1 Simulation Software
Altair's 2022.1 Simulation Software Release is Here!
This update focuses on sustainability solutions, simulation-driven design, and open-source design collaboration. The latest release builds upon Simulation 2022, including more new features and capabilities that broaden, strengthen, and further specialize Altair's comprehensive simulation toolkit.
Transforming Sustainable Product Design
As the world demands safer, more efficient, and more innovative products and processes, we aim to transform sustainable design and decision-making by applying simulation, cloud computing, and optimization throughout product lifecycles. Achieving lightweight designs with advanced manufacturing processes, material efficiencies, and meeting global design standards is all possible with Altair's sustainability solutions.
Improve Material Efficiency
Altair’s sustainable product design solutions begins with access to recyclable materials for material substitution. Altair® Material Data Center™ lets users access thousands of supported materials in its existing database, as well as an improved user experience in accessing high-fidelity material data. Integrated workflows support fatigue strength assessment of plastic components, providing a well-rounded, viable solution for innovative plastic part design.
Lighter, Better Designs
The development of efficient, sustainable designs requires finding an optimal balance among weight, performance, and cost considerations. As a generative design leader, Altair provides game-changing tools for creating products that meet project requirements while adhering to industry sustainability and climate protection goals.
Topology optimization with Altair® OptiStruct® addresses lightweighting for complex parts, accessible through Altair® Multiscale Designer®, with several new release updates. Multiscale workflows within Altair® HyperWorks® and Altair® SimLab® let users build accurate material definitions for short and long fiber formulations. Integration with HyperWorks continues to offer early design certification for composite designs and support for injection molding and structural solvers.
Shift to Green Computing
Using cloud-based, shared infrastructure among an organization, users can minimize project complexity. Save resources, efficiently scale and share project workloads, and increase simulation performance with Altair's high-performance computing (HPC) tools to design greener, more sustainable products. Fast and efficient simulation is critical, and solver scalability is assured with Altair's robust simulation portfolio.
“Altair's complete engineering and CAE workflows for lightweight design and material substitution enable sustainable design.”
- Viktor Seres, chief executive officer, X-Plast | Read Story
Make Better-Informed Early Design Decisions
By applying simulation earlier in the product development cycle, users can eliminate costly errors and reduce design time. With Altair, you get comprehensive access to the right tools all in one place. Analyze complex parts, apply dynamic motion simulation and parametric modeling, and optimize products for manufacturability.
Accelerate Simulation-Driven Design
Altair® Inspire™ delivers a dependable design creation and optimization experience via the Design Explorer which allows users to evaluate and validate varying designs quickly and easily so they can arrive at the optimal solution. Leveraging Altair® SimSolid® for lightning-quick design iteration, users can review simulation results and gain additional insights. In addition, parametric modeling is greatly enhanced for sketches, surfaces, and faces.
Updates for Altair’s manufacturability solutions include a demolding angle tool for casting, flow pattern preview tool for molding simulation, performance improvements for parametric modeling, and improved geometry features for stamping. With these enhancements, the Inspire family of products now enable even more accurate evaluations for the broadest range of additive and subtractive manufacturing processes.
Integrated Structural Analysis
Performing multiple design iterations is easier with the latest updates to Altair's structural analysis portfolio. Users can now transfer geometries between Inspire and SimSolid without using geometry files, providing users with a more holistic design experience. We've also added Solver Manager features and improved connections mapping to SimSolid.
A new OptiStruct update brings the ability to create solids from 1D beams and added materials and nonlinear analysis criteria, building upon its functionalities in stiffness, strength, stability, explicit dynamic, heat transfer, noise and vibration, fatigue analysis, and advanced topology and shape optimization.
Advanced Modeling and Visualization
HyperWorks's new Skeleton Modeling workflow streamlines the process of building a reduced order model for early conceptual optimization. Simplifying a donor model or topological optimization result promotes quicker turnaround times and facilitates more design studies. The workflow provides a mechanism to create the joints, members, and panels, and once created, lets users undertake real-time section editing, connectivity, and much more.
Model interpretation is further enhanced with 1D inflation capabilities. Being able to create 2D mesh or surfaces from a 1D section is an important step to shift from reduced order models back to detailed models.
“Altair gives us the best of both worlds in regard to speed and accuracy within simulations, ensuring we don’t have to sacrifice one for the other. And having their experts shoulder-to-shoulder with our team is a huge step forward for us. We’re thrilled to see what the future has in store for the team aided by Altair’s technology and staff.”
- Alessandro Franceschetti, head of structural engineering, Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli Team| Read Story
Maximize Your Simulation Tools
The open-sourcing of some of Altair's industry-leading product portfolio aims to take its industrially proven, robust, and reliable technology wider and further to the benefit of users with industry- and project-specific software needs. By making source code publicly accessible, contributors can modify source code, create new functions, and share their software with others from around the world.
Altair Radioss is Now Open-Source
For over 30 years, the world's top industrial, research and development, and educational organizations have employed Altair® Radioss® to solve complex linear and nonlinear engineering problems. Delivering the features and capabilities users know and trust, OpenRadioss™ is the open-source solver bringing together a worldwide community of experts and users to make the world a safer, greener place.
Open-Source for All Industries
Altair's open-architecture philosophy has driven its product development for the past 37 years, encouraging innovation and advanced technology development, regardless of industry. Intuitive workflows build into all of Altair's simulation software lets users modify established code and produce complex designs quickly and easily.
Within Inspire's new UI Designer toolkit, assemble designs with predefined objects, modify, and save designs as a Python code skeleton that users can further develop. Tools that are also powering Altair's open-source software include OpenPBS®, a workload manager and job scheduler for HPC, and OpenMatrix™, an open-source computational programming language.
Innovate Anywhere
Today, "open-source" refers not just to software development - it encompasses projects, products, and any initiatives that embrace the core principles of open exchange and collaborative participation based around community-oriented development. With Altair Exchange, users can utilize shared spaces for fine-tuning models, finding better scripts, optimizing virtual workspaces and workflows, and more.
“OpenRadioss is a game changer for academia, research institutions, and industry alike, and gives the users the power to modify mature codes for their own use – without having to start from scratch – and lets the users collaborate to accelerate the pace of innovation.”
Elham Sahraei, Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Director of Electric Vehicle Safety ab (EVSL), Temple University
Solutions for Every Product Development Stage
From model-based systems design and early geometry ideation and manufacturability, to detailed multiphysics simulation and optimization, Simulation 2022.1 includes a multitude of updates and enhancements. Here are some other product highlights:
- The latest release of Altair® Feko® includes a refactored CADFEKO, supporting password protection of models and encryption of components, among other enhancements. WinProp now features a newly added array synthesis tool for 5G connectivity studies, prediction models for enabling accurate predictions among buildings shadowed by topography, and improved radar post-processing updates. For simulating the performance of automotive radar in traffic, access a new library of traffic objects in the Altair Community.
- Altair® Flux® offers continued integration of the Flux solver in SimLab. New updates include improved matrix compression techniques that reduce the memory requirements and solving time in the case of large Flux projects, so users can generate and optimize high-performance electromechnical equipment faster.
- Altair® FluxMotor® addresses electric motor design and optimization and now offers more precise thermal modeling, a new online user help guide area, and a GUI that can now supports Japanese and Chinese.
- For accurate systems modeling, you can use Altair Embed® to develop electric drives for most machines used in industry and shorten the time to implement embedded electrical control systems by using eDrives blocks and ready-to-use examples. A new PSIM coupler block and 64-bit configuration support comes with the latest update. Altair Compose® provides updates for signal viewing, plot assisting, and multibody processing tools, as well as new OML commands and an upgrade to Python 3.8. The 2022.1 update brings new and extended code generation capabilities, a new model debugger utility, new libraries and blocks for multiphysics analysis, and improvements to romAI® for ROM creation in Altair Activate®.
- The recent addition of Powersim (PSIM) to Altair’s electronics solutions includes simulation and design tools for power electronics, including power supplies, motor drives, control systems, and microgrids. Altair® PSIM™ is now supported under Altair licensing, and recent updates such as direct co-simulation links with Activate and Embed for improved multiphysics simulation, thermal module improvements, and new design templates and three-phase elements are available.
- Altair® PollEx™ expands its design verification, signal integrity (SI), and PCB modeling functionalities, including a new modeler feature for comparing PCB designs with variants in CP.
- Concept Engineering joins Altair with its leading electronic system visualization software. CE’s VISION silicon debug tool lets users easily debug and explore complex and unfamiliar designs for faster time-to-production, supporting digitalization of the development and service processes using digital twin technology. Automotive, aerospace, and industrial markets utilize the Altair® EEvision™ platform to simplify the design, manufacturing, and service of complex electrical products and systems.
- Altair® SimLab® updates include hex mesh tool improvement, newly added materials for fluids and solids, and an improved workflow for molding model setup. As always, SimLab supports typical applications including drop test, multiphysics (thermal and structural) analysis for PCBs, as well as thermal management simulation of entire electronic systems.
- Altair® HyperWorks® evolves and brings easier installation and help access for CFD solvers and desktop products, new model download abilities when working with online tutorials, a new workflow for composites design and injection molding, a dark theme option, and more capabilities that strengthen its unparalleled ability to mesh, morph, assemble, manage, simulate, optimize, and visualize the world’s most complex products.
- The latest version of Altair® MotionSolve® includes significant feature enhancements for system modeling and analysis with MotionView, including tire soft-soil obstacles and aerodynamic forces in motorcycle and scooter models. A new flexbody contact supports 2D or 3D contact force between two bodies, and a new run workflow features a live connection to the solver through its msolve Python APIs.
- Notable enhancements have been made to Radioss for material, failure models, contacts, airbags, and more, along with continuous improvement to solver stability and performance. A new 2D seatbelt slipring and material is available as beta, and users can now glean more accurate and predictive material damage data.
- Gen3D supplements Altair’s additive manufacturing technology with Sulis activation now available for download with Altair Units in the Altair Marketplace. Included in this update is the ability to export OpenVDB signed distance field from the generate panel, as well as a resolved issue for normalizing custom strut lattice unit cells on creation.
- With Altair S-FRAME solutions, structural engineers have all the tools necessary for sustainable building design. Updates offer support for the latest country-specific design codes for steel, concrete, and mass timber design. Expanded interoperability with Building Information Modeling (BIM) tools ensure efficient design workflows, and educational licensing is enabled for S-FRAME products as part of HyperWorks EDU – just in time for the new academic season.
- Altair® EDEM™'s discrete modeling software for bulk and granular material simulation adds a new continuum analysis technique, allowing users to create, view, and export discrete particle data as continuum-data, visualized using planes. Lift and drag models are now compatible with EDEM GPU solvers, along with new methods for modifying creator parameters.
- Altair CFD™ simulation tools have expanded, including an improved user interface for missions and feed forward controllers in Altair® Flow Simulator™, as well as a new set of Coolprop incompressible liquids. Altair® nanoFluidX® users can now export motion model part displacements to nFx for fluid analysis involving non-uniform rotations and unique reference frames. A new gas kinetics model is available through Altair® AcuSolve®.
Visit the Altair Community for additional details on what's new for each product included in the new software release.