What’s New in Simcenter Mechanical simulation 2406

Physical tests require a prototype specimen to be outfitted with many expensive sensors to record what happens to the product in the real world.  However, technicians often do not know where and how to place sensors on the prototype to get good data. Instead, they use more sensors than they need, which takes more time to set up the test.  Simulation with the new Optimal Sensor Placement capability in Simcenter 3D Smart Virtual Sensing can help identify exactly how many sensors are needed, where they should be placed, and their orientation to get good physical test measurements.  This reduces the cost spent on unneeded sensors and saves time spent on instrumentation.  Now, with good physical test data, they can optimize their future simulation models to more accurately predict physical test results.  Capturing accurate physical test data also feeds downstream simulations, like durability analyses. 

With Simcenter 3D Durability and Simcenter 3D Smart Virtual Sensing, you can predict the accurate loads for your durability analysis using just a few strain measurements. Simcenter 3D carries out the load prediction by leveraging both measurement and simulation data with an integrated data fusion method. Predicted loads are passed to Simcenter 3D Durability via a dedicated Smart Virtual Sensing Event. With this event, you can carry out the full durability post-processing analysis from max stresses and safety factors to any durability result.  

The latest integration improvements not only help Test Engineers but System Engineers too. In Simcenter 3D Space Systems Thermal, updates to the co-simulation interface allow the selection of all, convective, radiative, thermal loads, or orbital heat flux sources to exchange with external solvers. Therefore, systems engineers using Simcenter Amesim can include the thermal data in their system model to better understand the thermal effects on solar arrays, batteries, equipment electrical loads, and more. This combined Simcenter package, therefore, enables systems engineers to model the battery charge and discharge cycles and conduct a power budget analysis.    

Leverage the combination of Simcenter 3D Design Space Exploration with Simcenter 3D Low-Frequency Electromagnetics to quickly explore design options for electromagnetic performance. You can create a design table with multiple configurations for your geometry, mesh, and materials and then automatically evaluate them all to find the best-performing design.     

Simcenter 3D Motion introduces its new dedicated tool, gear design optimization, which also leverages the power of design space exploration. In this case, the tool provides a preconfigured gear design optimization project, including industry-specific post-processing capabilities that allow for multi-attribute optimization of gear designs. 

For Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motors (PMSM), force spikes occur due to the alignment of rotor magnetic fields and stator teeth/slots. To reduce the spike and the subsequent torque ripple, it is common to step skew the rotor design. Such designs are easy to produce in Simcenter E-Machine Design, and with the latest update, you can import the multi-slice force information into Simcenter 3D and distribute it to the full vibro acoustic model for further NVH analysis.  

The intuitive definition of compound planetary gears in Simcenter 3D Motion Transmission Builder allows you to specify the most common industry layouts with minimal data entry. Compound planetary gears are compact and can handle high transmission ratios and power density, but their complexity heightens the risk of misalignment due to dynamic conditions, which in turn change the contact conditions. Therefore, to optimize NVH performance, it is imperative to find simple methods to negate misalignment and to understand the influence of gear mesh phasing and manufacturing errors.   

The frequency response of rotor dynamics has been updated to include applied loads with different frequencies, and then subsequently use multiple harmonics to simulate the vibrational behavior on unsymmetrical models. To efficiently model an anisotropic rotor within a stator, a new mixed reference frame approach is now available. Model your anisotropic rotor in a rotating reference frame using equations while your stator is modeled in a fixed reference frame, allowing you to avoid periodic functions of time. Then, in post-processing, each harmonic response is output, and harmonics are combined in orbit plots to compute the resulting vibration.   

Perform a modal frequency response on a cyclic symmetrical structure to avoid harmful resonance cases.

Modal frequency response can be computed for a cyclic symmetry structure with a model defined in Simcenter 3D. Furthermore, you can include nonlinear effects (sliding contact, creep and plasticity, and large displacements), during the loading phase.