Image courtesy of MSC Software.
The software is used by engineers to simulate products spanning multiple industries from automotive, to biomedical and consumer electronics.
MARC 2015 Focuses on Accurate Material Analysis and Assembly Behaviour
Marc 2015 has a strong focus on material analysis. As a result, the software features new material models for thermoplastics, elastomers and metal plasticity.
This allows Marc to simulate more complex material behaviour such as permanent deformation and anisotropic plastic deformation.
MSC also improved contact behaviour between parts within assemblies in Marc 2015. Traditionally, engineers do not use discrete entities (welds, bolts, rivets etc.) within simulations because they are computationally expensive. Instead, modellers will assume the parts are “glued” together, creating models that act stiffer than the assembly would be in reality.
In Marc 2015, however, a new contact behaviour has been added which can apply finite stiffness in the normal and tangential directions. This will improve the stress and deformation results near the contact areas.
New Mesh Element for Bending and Compressibility
New mesh elements in Marc 2015 aim to improve the accuracy of results.
These elements are dubbed “strain smoothing elements.” They possess an additional node and rely only on Fleishman degrees of freedom without Lagrange multipliers. This allows the elements to work with the iterative solver and all material models.
This means the strain smoothing elements focus on bending, compressible and incompressible behaviour. MSC has noted that these elements perform better than traditional low-order triangular and tetrahedral elements.
The reduction of the mesh’s size will make the simulations less computationally intensive. As a result, engineers will require fewer elements in their mesh to accurately simulate things like shear.
Adaptive Meshing in Marc for Crack Propagation
Marc 2015 has two more meshing tricks up its sleeve with respect to adaptive meshing.
Image of a crack propagating through a solid. As the crack tip moves through the solid the adaptive mesh will create finer elements near the crack tip. Image courtesy of MSC Software.
The first is a new geometry preservation methodology. This process will improve the accuracy of adaptive meshes that are globally applied to rubber components.
The second adaptive mesh improvement is a refinement of the template mesh at the tip of a 3D crack. This will allow engineers to better simulate crack propagation as well as the associated stresses and energies. This adaptive meshing technique aims to reduce the computational costs as the mesh refinement is only placed where it is required.
For a full release of a new simulation product, the additions to Marc 2015 seem a little light. MSC may be biting off more than it can chew with its extensive simulation line up.
Industry trends point towards amalgamating software into single multidisciplinary offerings. Perhaps MSC would benefit from knocking down its simulation silos and bridging them together instead?
To learn more about the Marc 2015 release, watch this video from MSC Software: