Siemens PLM Software provides the core technologies that power many of the world’s CAE software products

The market for CAE applications demands continuous improvements in functionality, robustness and value. Many of the world’s leading CAE developers use one or more of the Parasolid® and D-Cubed™ components to help satisfy these requirements, including:

Customers use these components to improve interoperability between their CAE products and other applications, and to provide a wide range of integrated, CAE specific, design and pre-processing capabilities

Interoperability

CAE applications need to reliably exchange models with other applications. Integrating Parasolid, the leading engine for the production of 3D design and engineering models, enables the direct read/write of the Parasolid native XT format, reducing import/export errors. A wide range of translators together with advanced modeling capabilities, such as tolerance to models with a variety of errors, makes Parasolid the ideal foundation for working with data in formats other than XT.

Pre-processor enhancements

The Parasolid components offer a range of powerful capabilities to enhance and modify imported models. For example, Parasolid Bodyshop repairs and optimizes models by sewing surfaces into solids, converting geometries to simpler forms, improving the accuracy of tolerant geometries, and removing small geometries. Advanced model simplification, interrogation functionality and tessellation (facet) generation support the creation of high quality input to the analysis process.

Integrated design capability

As well as importing geometric models from other applications, or being integrated as add-ons to such applications, many CAE systems now offer their own integrated model construction capability. The D-Cubed components complement Parasolid, with the 2D and 3D Dimensional Constraint Managers (2D DCM and 3D DCM) providing a range of parametric design capabilities. The benefits of an integrated design capability include:

• More tightly integrated user interfaces, workflows, technical support and supplier relationships.
• The opportunity to benefit from a higher proportion of end-user spending.
• Parametrically driven shape optimisation support based on the 2D or 3D DCM components.
• Customers that are familiar with the many mechanical CAD applications based on the Parasolid and D-Cubed components will feel particularly comfortable with an integrated design capability based on the same components.

For those CAE vendors that offer add-ons to other Parasolid-based CAD systems, a Parasolid license can offer faster, more comprehensive access to the capabilities of the modeler than through the API of the CAD system itself.

To discuss the contribution that the Parasolid and D-Cubed components can make to your business, or to evaluate the components, please contact us.