Monthly Archives: February 2017

Composites Modeling – From Black Art to Industrial Discipline

Composites always had a well-defined place in the aerospace industry because of their properties: lightweight to make overall design lighter and toughness to make overall design bear the aero structural loads. At present, from aircraft fairing to train noses, boat hulls and wind turbines, composites offer dramatic opportunities to meet increasing cost-driven market requirements and environmental concerns. However, modeling of

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Understanding Autodesk Vault – Change Management

Autodesk Vault offers a basic environment for change management that is more flexible and useful for more situations than people realize. The change management interface in Vault appears at first glance to only include a single rigid workflow for change, but upon further investigation you will find that it can be used more broadly.  Let’s take a look: ECR, ECO, ECN – The

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3D Master – When to buy FT1 and when to buy FTA

Previously, my colleague Mark Van DeBogert touched in an earlier blog post on the business side of CATIA 3D Master. Today, we are going to go a little further into understanding what is available to purchase from the Dassault CATIA V5 product line. As with a lot of Dassault CATIA products, there are two levels of the Functional Tolerancing & Annotation offering.  The licenses are

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Between Scylla and Charybdis; or, the Customization Dilemma

There they were, sailing along their merry way. Toward the horizon, a narrow strait approaches. As the boat gets closer, they notice a couple of strange characteristics; to one side a cliff and the other a whirlpool. Upon arrival, it becomes apparent that this is the cliff where the monster Scylla dwells. Looking to the other side, the monster Charybdis,

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What’s new in Abaqus 2017 Materials

The Dassault Systèmes SIMULIA portfolio releases new versions of its software products every year, and this year is no different. The first release of Abaqus 2017 is now available for download at the media download portal. SIMULIA has developed and broadcast 2017 release webinars to make users aware of new features available in the 2017 release, but those webinars are long

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Deriving More Value From PLM Data Through Reports

Enterprise-wide PLM systems hold huge amounts of business data that can potentially be used to drive business decisions and effect process changes to generate added value for the organization.  Several PLM users are unaware of the existence of such valuable data, while for others, advanced data search and retrieval can feel like looking for a needle in a haystack due to their

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