With the increasingly fierce competition in the world market, designers and manufacturers are increasingly aware of CAE in its product design and manufacturing process of the important position, due to product performance simulation involves the diversity of disciplines and CAD system between the characteristics of each bureau, There is an urgent need to be able to integrate a variety of CAE simulation in an easy to learn and use, unified and complete platform. MSC.Patran is from this point of view the development of the finite element frame platform, the designer can easily according to their own needs for multidisciplinary engineering analysis and data exchange. Therefore, MSC.Patran is widely used in aviation, aerospace, automobile shipbuilding, machinery, manufacturing, electronics, teaching and research and other industries.

1 MSC.Patran the main features

1) Meet the CAE process of the user interface, as shown below, according to the steps on the Navigator will be able to complete the entire analysis tasks, do not have to find a menu button in a different menu.

2) Excellent compatibility, openness

3) Powerful customization features (PCL language)

4) Direct Geometry Access (DGA)

5) The high-level mesh segmentation feature quickly generates high-quality face grids on complex, defective surfaces and provides convenient user controllability

6) Supports multiple CAE solvers to support Nastran, Marc, Dytran, Sinda, Abaqus, Ansys.

7) Unique composite modeling tool LAMINATE MODELER

8) Unique variable field technology

9) Different hardware platform and operating system database compatibility, windows, linux and Unix systems are supported.

10) Large model fast graphics operation

2 MAC.Patran main function

2.1 Open geometric access and model construction

1) Direct access to CAD geometric model

MSC.Patran has broken the traditional finite element analysis of the pre-and post-processing model, its unique geometric model direct access technology (Direct Geometry Access, referred to as DGA) for all CAD software system between the geometric model communication and analysis of various types of seamless analysis provided The perfect integration environment. With DGA technology, application engineers can access existing CAD system databases directly within the framework of MSC.Patran, read, transform, modify, and manipulate geometrical models that are being designed without replication. Supported CAD software includes: CATIA, UG, Pro / E, Solidworks, SolidEdge and so on. MSC.Patran also supports a variety of geometric standard format files, including Parasolid, ACIS, STEP, IGES and other formats.

The CAD information read by MSC.Patran includes: rendezvous points, curves, surfaces, and entities. For UG, not only can be read into the characteristics, but also in the PATRAN according to the analysis requirements of the characteristics of the changes and editing, then the characteristics of any can be returned to the UG CAD design modified to use. For CATIA V5, support for attribute input, including feature name, layer information, color and transparency. STEP209 format also supports the input of finite element information. The latest PATRAN supports Parasolid geometry for automatic feature recognition, which can display, edit and delete these features.

The latest MSC.Patran CAD interface is not only the enterprise standard CAD system data interface, but also on the interface performance, speed and accuracy are significantly improved. Improvements make the data transfer between MSC.Patran and CAD systems better and more integrated.

2) CAD geometric modeling function

MSC.Patran not only has the basic geometric modeling capabilities, but also provides a series of Parasolid-based advanced geometric modeling and editing functions, such as Boolean operations, chamfering, imprinting, shelling, pumping the surface and parametric modeling.

3) Introduces new parametric surface creation capabilities

MSC.Patran geometric creation toolkit has been further expanded, contains a new series of parametric surface creation, we call "P-shapes". These surfaces can be provided in topological formologies commonly used for thermal analysis such as Sinda and MSC.Patran Thermal. Thermal analysts, especially in the design of the study will need these shapes when the geometry, each P-shapes can use the common engineering parameters to define such as radius, diameter, rotation axis, rotation angle and so on. Moreover, P-shapes can quickly take advantage of Patran's full-face mesh divider for meshing, while supporting hard, hard-line functionality, even with minimal grid control.

4) Intelligent model processing

MSC.Patran allows the user to directly set the load, boundary conditions, material and cell characteristics on the geometric model and automatically convert the information into relevant finite element information to minimize the time spent in the design process.

2.2 Finite element modeling

MSC.Patran provides a comprehensive, flexible and flexible modeling capability for complex finite elements that can meet a variety of analytical accuracy requirements.

Perfect mapping of meshing

MSC.Patran guides the world's leading mapping meshing technology to efficiently generate various types of cells for various geometries with parametric characteristics. MSC.Patran has the function of generating high-order elements from low-order unit mapping, and also has a variety of similar seed points, hard points, hard lines and other mapping grid control function.

Fast, accurate automatic meshing

MSC.Patran from the CAD system to read the surface and the entity also has the function of automatic meshing, in the process of automatic division can also use the seed point, hard points, hard lines and other functions, local encryption area of interest grid.

The new Advanced Surface Meshing option simplifies the creation of cells on complex geometries

Experienced analysts know that it is a cumbersome job to enter, modify, and organize the geometric information of CAD to adapt the grid to the entire virtual product simulation process. MSC.Patran introduces the functionality of ASM II to enable MSC.Patran to remain the world's leading CAD and VPD integration environment. ASM II provides a complete set of tools for quickly translating CAD geometry into geometric geometry, as listed below for ASM II's new tool options

Create Surface Options:

Quickly create the initial grid

Identify and stitch free boundaries

Automatically generate rules for surfaces

Easily repair geometry:

Automatically select gaps between borders

Automatically suture the selected gap

Match and shrink geometric corners to coordinate geometry

Easily edit geometry:

Automatically merge gaps

Fill openings and slender crevices

Insert corners and delete geometric points

Delete and split surfaces

Decomposition curve

Edit / merge surfaces to merge surfaces

The new bolt modeling tool is used to quickly create assembly models:

Bolt connection is very extensive in practical applications, creating a bolted connection in Patran is very convenient, and under the Tools menu there is a new creation of bolt preload and associated MPC menu definition Bolt MPC can be created in three ways: Geometry, vector-based and unit-based.

Variable field:

In order to be able to easily define the definition of the physical quantities of the various changes encountered during the establishment of the finite element analysis model, MSC.Patran provides a variety of methods for defining variables that can be easily defined in the interface of MSC.Patran with space, , Temperature and other changes in the material properties, dynamic characteristics, as well as the overall to the local calculation of data exchange between the exchange of data and different types of data conversion, but also through the secondary development of PCL language directly from the external test data to form changes The physical field.

2.3 Analysis integration

As a world-class front and rear processor, MSC.Patran's analytics manager provides customers with a unified, integrated control platform for a variety of analysis types. Analysts can choose different analysis environments based on different analysis requirements (including the finite element application analysis software provided by MSC and third-party analysis software). In this way, engineering analysts do not need to master different pre-and post-processing software, for different types of analysis do not need to repeat the establishment of the model.

MSC.Patran and a variety of analysis software has a complete combination of support for a variety of different software unit library definition, material constitutive model of the input and a variety of boundary conditions defined. MSC.Patran The latest analysis software supported by the test includes: MD Nastran, MSC Nastran, Marc, Dytran, Flightloads, Thermal, Fatigue, MSC Sinda, LS-DYNA3D, ABAQUS, ANSYS.

2.4 Results Interactive Visualization Postprocessing

MSC.Patran provides a variety of conventional computing analysis of visualization tools, such as moiré, deformation, curve form, animation, vector tensor, etc., to help engineers to flexibly and quickly understand the structure under the load of complex behavior , Such as structural stress, deformation, temperature field, fatigue life, fluid flow.

MSC.Patran provides a technique for reassembling and displaying the results of different finite element calculations. It is suitable for the combination of the results of the same case and is also suitable for the combination of different conditions. For a variety of post-processing display mode, in order to facilitate the call, MSC.Patran can also be stored in the corresponding template. The use of MSC.Patran as a post-processing tool, whether it is thermal structural analysis of the maximum stress display, or non-linear analysis of the deformation of the display, or dynamic analysis of the dynamic results of the animation processing, will become extremely convenient.

MSC.Patran also provides special tools for post-processing of internal results, such as isometric, equidistant, dynamic results of the slice display, the selection of these perspective tools can be real-time observation of the internal results of the entity.

The results of the latest chromatography support 256 colors, the results of post-processing has been to support the 256-color color moire map, which is easy to get more accurate color gradient changes and satisfactory moire post-processing results.

2.5 PCL language secondary development

PCL language is MSC.Patran customization tool, is a high-level modular structure of the programming language. Users can use the PCL language to write a specific user interface, icons, etc., in particular, to create professional analysis required by the process and function. Read and write Patran command stream, through the PCL language, other commercial or self-compiled analysis program can be integrated into the MSC.Patran software system. Almost all of the analysis software used the industry-recognized PCL tools to establish a direct integration relationship with Patran. CCS China Classification Society using Patran's PCL language developed "Haihong color".