CAD Atomic Blog

Solid Edge ST2 is now shipping to customers and is available for download. A couple notable new features are Solid Edge Simulation and Synchronous Sheet Metal. Solid Edge Simulation is a an embedded implementation of Siemens PLM's standalone FEA product FEMAP. Prior to ST2, Solid Edge shipped with a feature called FEMAP Express (now called "Simulation Express" in ST2) which was limited in load/constraint options and to single parts. In ST2, Simulation Express is still what's included with the product but Solid Edge Simulation can optionally be purchased as an add-on license through your normal sales channel. The good news is that Solid Edge ST2 does come with a temporary license for Solid Edge Simulation good through December, so install early so that you can try it out. Now as I mentioned earlier, Solid Edge Simulation is an integrated implementation of FEMAP. What this means is that it has a lot of FEMAP's capabilities, but the UI is Solid Edge's which mea...

I thought I would throw out some thoughts out on a term that some individuals are throwing around like they just pioneered it. The term is "Digital Prototyping". Lets start of first by defining what it means. Essentially it means that whatever design checks you might have gone through with a physical model, you are now doing with a virtual model at least up front to reduce the number of physical models needed to prove a design. So for instance, if you were designing a new car door handle: The old school method would be to get a physical prototype made of the actual material using temporary aluminum mold tooling costing 10's of thousands of dollars and waiting weeks to get it and then mount it into a special fixture with data aq and servos/pneumatics to simulate Bruno opening his car door. If it failed, start over, spend 10's of thousands of dollars again and wait weeks. The Virtual Prototyping method would be to load your 3D CAD model into one of the many FEA packages...