An industry standard for over 40 years, Nastran is a finite element solver for stress, vibration, structural failure, heat transfer, acoustics and aeroelasticity analyses. Major manufacturers rely on NX Nastran for their critical engineering computing needs, so that they can produce safe, reliable and optimized designs within increasingly shorter design cycle times.

Over 40 enhancements have been made in NX Nastran 8, including the following key areas.

Discipline and Physical Domain Extension

Siemens is making significant investments to expand NX Nastran’s solution capabilities, so analysts can use a common solver to address a broader range of problems. Highlights of discipline and physical domain extensions in NX Nastran 8 include:

• Multiphysics thermo-mechanical analysis allows you to analyze thermal contact problems that will also have impact on structural performance. The thermo-mechanical analysis is done by coupling an NX Thermal solution with an NX Nastran solution (SOL 101) for linear statics analysis. Coupling is made easy within the integrated environment, and eliminates data transfer errors.
• Non-linear analysis material and loading extensions lets you simulate more material types for non-linear analysis. Examples include visco-elastic properties for both hyperelastic and non-hyperelastic materials, Mullins effect with hyperelastic material, and combined creep with elastic/plastic strain.
• Rotor Dynamics, used for analysis of rotating machinery, enables analysis of generic, symmetric and asymmetric rotating structures in both fixed and rotating reference systems. It provides critical speed and stability analyses, frequency and transient response computations, both in direct and modal approaches.

Computational Performance and Numerical Accuracy

Analysis models today can routinely be on the order of 10 to 20 million DOFs in size. As computer hardware continues to improve, analysis model sizes also continue to grow. Siemens makes sure NX Nastran’s solver performance keeps ahead of the pace so that you can efficiently solve ever-larger analysis problems. Computational performance and numerical accuracy improvement highlights available in NX Nastran 8 include:

• Parallel computing scalability improvements increase SMP (shared memory parallel) processing performance and address frequency response optimization for DMP (distributed memory parallel) processing
• RDModes has been extended to include the modal transient response (SOL 112) and modal analysis with optimization (SOL 200) solutions. This allows more solutions to receive SMP and DMP performance benefits.

Ease of Modeling and Engineering Workflow

NX Nastran 8 simplifies modeling, solution set-up and results postprocessing. Highlights of these improvements in NX Nastran 8 include:

• Connection improvements greatly simplify the finite element modeling process. NX Nastran’s contact mechanisms have been extended to include special cases such as edge-to-surface contacts. Loads carried by glue connections can also be viewed in a postprocessor.
• New composite solid element gives a more geometrically precise representation of a composite material. Other new element improvements introduced in NX Nastran 8 include pyramid element support for hyperelastic materials and easier material coordinate system definitions for solid elements.