Hello Everyone. A happy new year 2021 to all my friends in the blog community. I always return during this time of the year with information on new release and this year is no different. Before proceeding I should mention that 2021 release has exhaustive updates in Abaqus solver functionalities compared to updates in 2020 release. But before that, lets look at what’s new in 2021x CAE.

• The Power’By connection enhancement:

There is a good news for 3DX community at the bridge of CAE. Earlier, Power’By role limited the use of CAE from within the 3DExperience environment. Now with SIM connector called “buddy” it is possible to launch CAE as usual from outside 3DX and it is still connected to 3DX. It is further possible to open models from 3DX database, import 3DX content as well as save to 3DX database all from CAE that is launched from outside 3DX.

• Material Properties GUI support:

The material interface has been modified to define additional thermal parameters such as Gap conductance and Gap radiation and Gap convection. A material column has also been added to the section manager for better visibility.

• Ply thickness support enhancement:

It has always been possible to define individual ply thickness using a fixed value and later by discreet fields. Now the analytical field support has been added to define individual plies in the overall composite layup.

• General contact property enhancements:

The individual contact property assignments now include an option to pick the support via material name instead of surface. I believe this enhancement was made in some FD of 2020x. However the 2021x has been further improved by enhancing surface property definition using beam smoothing and surface vertex parameters. The small sliding contact formulation has also been added as an additional parameter in general contact.

• Few enhancements related to Tosca

These are not necessarily TOSCA solver enhancements but rather inclusion of Tosca features in CAE GUI. The first one is introduction of stress design response in sizing optimization. The second one is definition of plane and rotational symmetry manufacturing constraint for non symmetric meshes.

• Composite visualization enhancements:

Abaqus recently introduced composite prism elements in its solver but in the viewer stress results were visible in the bottom layer only. Now the results can be viewed in any layer as defined in the section point definition.