Vendor Spotlight:

ALTAIR ENGINEERING RELEASES ALTAIR HYPERWORKS 6.0

Altair Engineering Inc. announced the release of Altair HyperWorks 6.0 -- the next generation of its innovative CAE software suite that delivers an advanced engineering desktop solution for use in any industry or PLM system where products need to be highly engineered.

"This software release is the most comprehensive in the company's history. It culminates nearly 100 man-years of technological advancements to empower the global design and engineering community to develop better products faster," said Michael J. Kidder, corporate marketing director, Altair.

HyperWorks 6.0 introduces four entirely new products and an impressive list of advancements in modeling, analysis, optimization, visualization, process automation and manufacturing simulation -- all within an open engineering framework.

"The global manufacturing community is looking more and more to automate and standardize CAE processes -- improving organizational efficiency and product quality," said Jeffrey M. Brennan, vice president for Altair's commercial software business line.

"Additionally, there is a significant movement to not only design for product performance but also for robustness and reliability. Our new product introductions further enable our customers to automate engineering workflow activities and efficiently optimize products for performance and robustness," Brennan added.

New products include:

• HyperWorks Process Manager automates and captures corporate best-practices for the entire simulation process. HyperWorks Process Manager is a programmable work flow manager that intelligently guides users through defined processes. This technology enables rapid development and deployment of process automation solutions throughout the organization, benefiting product quality, reliability and staff productivity.
• HyperMorph is a mesh manipulation tool that allows users to quickly parameterize models and stretch finite element meshes while keeping mesh distortion at a minimum. HyperMorph quickly reduces design and engineering costs as existing meshes can be quickly morphed to hypothetical design considerations -- without remeshing -- for evaluation while preserving the model integrity and connectivity. This powerful new functionality eliminates the need to continuously work back through the CAD system to evaluate design considerations and automatically creates design variables for optimization studies. With the new FE-to-Surf capability in HyperMesh, NURB surfaces can be created from morphed meshes and exported to commercial CAD systems.
• Altair HyperStudy is a parametric study and multi-disciplinary optimization tool for robust product design. Specifically developed for design of experiments (DOE), stochastic simulations and optimization studies, engineers can gain insight into the physics of a design, assess the robustness of a design for controlled or uncontrolled variations in the design parameters and optimize a design for multi-disciplinary attributes. HyperStudy has an easy-to-use interface and enables a process-based study setup. Further, HyperStudy's integration into Altair HyperWorks makes it easily accessible within any CAE environment, i.e., linear, nonlinear or multi-physics environment.

Performance and productivity advancements include:

• HyperMesh, the world's leading, solver-independent pre- and post-processor for finite element analysis, offers new functionality for automated mid- surface extraction, mesh and geometry morphing, new connector entities for improved assembly and welding, and a quality-index (QI) meshing and smoothing algorithm. Altair has also increased the robustness of HyperMesh through enhanced interoperability, interfacing speed and user efficiency. These enhancements include new Pro/Engineer and STEP geometry readers, solver- specific user profiles and a "rapid menu" feature which can decrease mouse travel by as much as 70 percent.
• OptiStruct, Altair's innovative concept design tool has once again raised the bar for structural optimization with new capabilities, including 1-D topology optimization for connector/weld placement optimization and composite laminate optimization. Frequency Response analysis and Inertia Relief analysis have also been added to the basic finite element solver solution.
• HyperView is a complete post-processing and visualization environment for finite element analysis (FEA), multi-body system simulation, video and engineering data that sets a new standard for high-speed post-processing and reporting. This release includes new direct readers for ABAQUS *.odb, ANSYS *.rst, NASTRAN *.op2 and HyperMesh *.res file formats. Support of vector and tensor plots, local coordinate systems and HTML report formats further extend the value of this product as a general purpose FEA and MBD post-processor.

Global distribution of HyperWorks 6.0 is underway and will be completed by September end. To support the release, Altair will be hosting a number of seminars and online presentations throughout the US, Europe and Asia. For more information on these events and HyperWorks, please visit http://www.altair.com.