Dassault Systèmes recently announced the release of Version 6.6 of Abaqus, its advanced finite element analysis software suite within the Simulia product portfolio.

The company’s highly regarded analysis products, Abaqus/Standard and Abaqus/Explicit, offer new capabilities in vibration analysis, material failure characterisation, tyre modelling, and computing performance.

“Abaqus Version 6.6 offers many new and exciting features that we expect to significantly enhance our capability to accurately and efficiently simulate complex tyre structures,” says David M Dryden, Manager, Research & Technology at Cooper Tire & Rubber Company.

“We are especially looking forward to the ability to apply an extension of steady state transport theory to periodic treaded tire structures.

“This technology provides a highly efficient method to incorporate detailed tread geometries onto complex tyre structures for analysis of tire/road interactions and offers the potential to advance the approximation of treaded tyre structures in steady state rolling.”

New features of Abaqus Version 6.6 include:

• Automatic multi-level substructuring (AMS).

• Material failure characterisation.

• Bolted-joint simulation with threads.

• Tyre modelling.

A new feature for vibration analysis (Fig. 1) in Abaqus Version 6.6 rapidly calculates hundreds or thousands of natural frequencies to help manufacturers improve product performance under dynamic loading conditions. This image shows velocity contours for a response load case on an automotive engine which can be used to assess engine noise.

With many technical innovations, enhanced usability features, and open-systems links to the major CAD and CAE packages, Abaqus Version 6.6 provides a scalable environment for simulation and accelerates the process simulating realistic product behaviour.

Abaqus Inc is based in Providence, RI, USA. www.abaqus.com