Architecture, Engineering & Construction (AEC)

AEC requirements have largely converged with those of CAD. For example, the design of buildings with freeform shapes is more commonplace. Parasolid enables the creation of sculpted shapes easily using lofts, sweeps, extrusions, and similar functions.

Parasolid performance is also well-suited to handling AEC designs that need to manage thousands of repeat features at an acceptable speed.

AEC software vendors who license Parasolid include Bentley Systems, Midas IT, Nemetschek Allplan and Nemetschek Vectorworks.

Cloud applications

Time-to-market is critical in the rapidly advancing world of cloud application development. Parasolid provides a geometric modeling foundation for building robust, feature-rich design, manufacturing and simulation capabilities into cloud native and cloud deployable applications.

Parasolid is thread-safe and selectively employs symmetric multi-processing to harness the computational performance of cloud servers.

Cloud-based software vendors who license Parasolid include GrabCAD, Onshape, Simscale, and Zazzle.

Computer-Aided Design (CAD)

CAD is used extensively to create the complex geometry required for consumer and industrial products. Parasolid is used to model complex part geometry in the first instance, and enable modifications through design iterations and reuses.

Parasolid’s ability to quickly modify complex design models (also known as tweaking) without failure or user-intervention is an excellent benchmark for the robustness and performance of a solid modeler.

CAD software vendors who license Parasolid include Bentley Systems, Fujitsu, IronCAD, Onshape, Shapr3D, and Top Systems.

Computer-Aided Engineering (CAE)

Parts designed in Parasolid applications can be transferred without translation to CAE software for creating a finite element analysis (FEA) mesh, and to support a vast array of analysis techniques based on CAD models. Typically, the analysis specialist will make small non-structural changes to a part to accelerate the engineering analysis.

Increasingly, CAE users want to modify the part after each analysis to optimize its characteristics without referring to the originating CAD system.

CAE software vendors who license Parasolid include Altair, ANSYS, COMSOL, MSC Software, Simscale and many others.

Computer-Aided Manufacturing (CAM)

Parts designed in Parasolid applications can be transferred without translation to CAM software to generate CNC instructions or tooling design. Manufacturing specialists often make small non-functional changes to optimize the part for manufacturing. Examples include standardizing concave blend sizes to match a particular cutter or adjusting taper angles to ensure better ejection from a mold.

CAM software vendors who license Parasolid include CNC Software, DP Technology, GO2cam, Missler Software, Renishaw, Thermwood, Vero Software and many others.

Data Exchange

Parasolid customers can import Parasolid XT parts without translation from more than 350 Parasolid-based applications. Many CAD systems that use a different solid modeler also license Parasolid for interoperability with the XT format.

However, there is still the need to exchange data between Parasolid-based applications and non-Parasolid sources via standard or proprietary file formats. Some Parasolid customers produce conversion toolkits in this area which are deployed by ISVs as read/write filters to the various formats.

Enterprise & Government

Parasolid is the perfect tool for in-house applications that capture specific expertise in a specialist modeling domain. For example, an aerospace company may have an in-house system to model the aerodynamic performance of wing designs. Such systems capture years of domain expertise and give the company a competitive advantage from functionality that isn’t commercially available.

Parasolid can provide the geometric modeling foundation for such systems, leaving the in-house development team to focus on the domain specific algorithms that add value.

Parasolid for Academic

Parasolid is used by over 100 universities and institutions for academic research and teaching. Our solution comes with extensive software documentation, application support materials and a prototyping environment. This makes Parasolid the ideal tool for exposing students and researchers to the leading geometric modeling technology used in sophisticated commercial applications for CAD, AEC, CAM, and CAE.

Academic projects can have direct applicability to commercial applications by adopting the same industry-proven geometric modeling technology that is used by more than 130 software vendors.

Visualization

Visualization applications often need to import parts from a variety of design applications, each of which may be running different versions. Parasolid’s data strategy guarantees upward compatibility for Parasolid files dating back to the first release, giving access to a large proportion of the world’s 3D CAD data with total reliability, making it the obvious choice as a core modeler.

Parasolid’s high-performance faceting functionality also offers extensive control over the tessellated output, making it ideal for generating the precise format required to optimize image speed and quality.