Web-Deployable Process Automation Solutions

Despite the more widespread adoption of advanced product performance simulation tools over the past 20-25 years across many industries, the use of these CAE software tools is still predominantly limited to analysis experts with deep domain expertise in their particular area of focus (structural, thermal, optics, multi-body dynamics, controls,CFD, noise/vibration, etc.) based on many years of real world application experience.

Despite significant efforts by the software vendors including the integration of 3-D CAD and CAE tools, the long-touted goal to make performance simulation an integral part of the product design process and to have “non-experts” safely utilize this technology has generally not been achieved.

Comet’s Intelligent Template capabilities addresses the significant shortcomings of the previous automated approaches to Simulation-driven Design:

1) “Best practice” process templates that capture and leverage the unique IP of your company are created by the domain experts and can be safely deployed to other users who can safely execute the templates to rapidly get real time feedback on the performance of their design concepts.   For well-defined classes of standard, repeatable work processes, a very simple user interface can be created which is deployable via the web which automatically runs a previously defined and validated Comet template in the background hosted in your engineering compute environment.

2) Significant design configuration and geometric/topology changes for a single product or even a family of designs can be evaluated using the exact same template.

3) Comet templates are also independent of the source and formats of the design geometry (multiple 3-D CAD tools, direct modelers, legacy FE meshes) and can be used with many types of commercial calculation tools at multiple levels of fidelity (e.g., Excel, MATLAB, Nastran, ANSYS, ABAQUS, Thermal Desktop, MSC ADAMS, CODE V, SigFit, etc.).

4) Processes can be defined and automated without the use of custom coding and scripts which are brittle and can easily become out of date/non-functional as commercial software versions are continually updated.

5) Processes and their corresponding inputs, models and results are captured automatically in the Comet Project and can be shared and re-used among project team members as well as across other projects and with partners/suppliers.

Bottom line, Comet process automation solutions can lead to greater engineering productivity and effectiveness by “democratizing” the use of simulation technology across a wider range of users including design engineers, less experienced analysts, systems engineers and program managers.