Altair Announces SIMSOLID Acquisition

Altair has announced its acquisition of structural simulation software company SIMSOLID, which has the mission to “fundamentally change the intensity of usage of Structural Analysis within the mechanical product design process,” and the company has been doing exactly that with its finite element analysis (FEA) platform aimed specifically at design engineers.

SIMSOLID was cofounded by Victor Apanovitch, who personally contributed to the development of SIMSOLID’s underlying technology, which allows engineers to run structural simulations on high fidelity CAD assemblies without the need for geometry simplification, cleanup or meshing.

As a result, obtaining solutions with SIMSOLID’s simulation is less resource heavy than with traditional FEA methods, meaning that large and complex assemblies can be solved rapidly even on laptop computers.

Figure 1. Displacement plot within SIMSOLID. (Image courtesy of SIMSOLID.)

“We believe SIMSOLID is a revolutionary technological breakthrough which will have a profound impact for product design," said James Scapa, Altair’s founder, chairman and CEO, “It’s incredibly fast, accurate and robust, and we believe a game changer for our industry."

SIMSOLID contains the following different types of simulation, which will be familiar to FEA users:

Linear Statics
Modal
Thermal
Thermal Stress
Geometric Nonlinear Statics
Material Nonlinear Statics
Dynamics—time, frequency and random response

The SIMSOLID computational engine is a commercial implementation of novel and unpublished mathematics based on extensions to the theory of external approximations. SIMSOLID controls solution accuracy using multi-pass adaptive analysis, making it extremely fast and memory efficient.

Figure 2. A von Mises plot of a bolt preload analysis. (Image courtesy of SIMSOLID.)

“We are very serious about solution accuracy,” said Uwe Schramm, Altair’s chief technical officer. “Others have tried to accelerate the interface between CAD and simulation by degrading the mathematical robustness. It is our feeling that by rapidly moving forward with the methods in SIMSOLID and expanding them across applications, we can have a real effect on how design gets done while maintaining our high standards for computational excellence.”

To hear what the executives have to say about the recent acquisition, you can see more in the video below.

And you can read more about SIMSOLID, register for webinars, or find out how you can get SIMSOLID at this link.