What Altair touts as “its most significant release inthe company’s history” comes at the worst of times, when we are consumed with worry about COVID-19 and further distracted by riots in our streets. As every other engineering software vendor has now done, Altair turned its event from physical to virtual. Maybe you saw it. Probably you didn’t notice. As the media, which is supposed to inform you of news you can use and which normally swarms physical events (it’s one of their perks) was also too distracted to give the event the attention it deserved.
For Altair, the show must go on, with or without a physical event.
Here was James Scapa, chairman, founder and chief executive officer of Altair, exhorting all who had registered, building up the virtual crowd (we have to imagine it) with, yet again, the most innovations ever. The more jaded among us accept this claim as commonplace. But our job is to listen. We know Altair to be one of the few independent simulation companies still standing. All the others have been scooped up by software companies of another type and of greater means.
Consider the slew of enhancements to Altair’s vast and varied simulation portfolio that we cannot let go unnoticed.
- HyperWorks, Altair’s flagship product for structural analysis, sports a new interface.
- SimSolid now includes “advanced” seam weld connections.
- Radioss runtime is far less for simulating drop testing of electronics devices.
- AcuSolve’s GPU acceleration is 3 to 4 times faster and adds support for nucleate boiling, radiation, condensation/evaporation and multiphase fluid-structure interact.
- ultraFluidX adds a new wall model and overset grid technique.
- nanoFluidX is 3x faster, according to Altair.
- Industrial design and structural app Inspire have integrated the SimSolid solver to include support and connector forces and better geometry generation from optimization.
- Inspire Studio will now handle more geometry types.
- For 3D printing, Inspire will have a new unit cell lattice generation.
- For electromagnetics, SimLab, which is used for electric motor simulation, adds ECAD file import(ODB++).
- FEKO has a component library that is integrated with CADFEKO.
- FluxMotor adds thermal and acoustic evaluation.
- Flux can model iron losses and skew type motors.
- Altair introduced the following for systems modeling:
- Activate, a multi-physics system modeling with hardware in the loop and IoT for digital twin development.
- EDEM bulk material modeling is integrated with multibody dynamics and hydraulics, so it’s better suited for heavy equipment and agricultural machinery.
- MotionView adds two-wheel vehicle dynamics to model motorcycles and scooters. Not bikes?
- For data analytics, Altair released Panopticon, a “platform” for monitoring real-time data with a major update of cloud-based deployment meant to for use with a web browser and Monarch, which connects data to Microsoft Excel.
- Altair SmartWorks has been rearchitectured and optimized for edge computing.
- Access adds more work-from-home features, tunes up 3D remote visualization, and more, according to Altair.