Dassault Systèmes announces the availability of Abaqus 6.8, its technology-leading unified finite element analysis (FEA) software suite from SIMULIA. Engineers, designers, researchers, and scientists use Abaqus to lower costs and reduce cycle times through the realistic simulation of stress, impact, crush, fluid-structure interaction, thermal dynamics, and other complex behaviors of products, materials, and processes.

With a focus on solving specific engineering challenges in automotive, aerospace, electronics, energy, packaged goods, and other industry segments, Abaqus 6.8 provides new and improved capabilities in core areas, including modeling and results visualization, structural analysis, composites failure, general contact, computing performance, and multiphysics.

“Abaqus FEA software provides the robust contact capabilities that we need to study complex loading and structural interactions while designing our large, two-stroke diesel engines,” stated Per Rønnedal, Senior Manager, R&D New Design, MAN Diesel. “With the new capabilities in Abaqus 6.8, we have seen memory usage significantly reduced when running linear static analyses with multiple load cases. These improvements will allow us to test a number of design alternatives to optimize our diesel engine performance during early product development.”

“This latest release of Abaqus Unified FEA software is another milestone in our long history of developing simulation technology that accelerates our customers’ evaluation of real-world behavior of their products and processes,” stated Steve Crowley, director of product management, SIMULIA. “With literally hundreds of new features and customer-requested enhancements, Abaqus 6.8 demonstrates SIMULIA’s commitment to technical excellence, industry-focused solutions, and customer satisfaction.”

Designers and engineers in all industries are able to leverage Abaqus 6.8 to deepen their knowledge of real-world structural behavior and accelerate the development of innovative products. Among the latest advancements are:

• Fully built-in and improved composites analysis capabilities that enable aerospace engineers to efficiently simulate the behavior of composite crack propagation, delamination, and possible failure.
• Industry-unique capabilities that allow automotive engineers to capture full-vehicle noise and vibration response due to tire rolling effects and viscoelastic material effects from tires, bushings, isolators, and laminated steel.
• A low-cycle fatigue method that assists electronics engineers in assessing the lifecycle of solder joints. This method is also useful for evaluating powertrain durability and bone degradation in biomechanical applications.
• A new anisotropic hyperelastic material model that enables medical device developers to simulate soft tissue interaction with stents and orthopedic implants. This model can also be used to analyze materials such as reinforced rubber and wood.
• A new Coupled Eulerian-Lagrangian (CEL) multiphysics capability that allows industrial equipment manufacturers to predict loads on earth-moving equipment during soil excavation. The capability can also be used to predict the behavior of fluid-filled containers, hydroplaning tires, and bird-strike on aircraft.