Editor’s Pick: MSC Announces New Release of Nastran 2012

By Anthony J. Lockwood

Dear Desktop Engineering Reader:

Well, my excuse is that life gets crazy from Halloween through New Year’s. But, as Mom always said, good things come to those who wait. So, if you dropped the ball and never got around to checking out or upgrading to MSC Nastran 2012 after its November unveiling, your lollygagging was worth it for once. MSC Software just put out a point release — dot 2 — and it caught my attention. Here’s why.

First, an MSC Nastran 2012 memory refresh. This, IMHO, is a “major” major release. A highlight is that MSC consolidated its MSC Nastran and MD (multidisciplinary) Nastran products into one solution. This simplifies matters for MD and MSC Nastran users (and MSC’s sales team) and—speculation here—it acknowledges that the future of multiple physics analysis is bright. Oh, and to boot, it creates a monster-powerful suite for FEA-based analysis and optimization.

MSC Nastran 2012 offers a bunch of neat stuff. For example, through an optional module, you can simulate nonlinear problems like geometric nonlinearity,  material nonlinearity, and contact nonlinearity. Another module helps you solve explicit nonlinear problems like impact and FSIs (fluid-structure interactions).

For composites, there’s lamina stresses, lamina strains,  failure indices, and strength ratios now enabled for frequency response,  transient response, and random vibration simulations. Acoustic analyses sound easier and more efficient with a single-step approach for interior/exterior acoustic studies. New functions help you compute and output element sensitivity for acoustic responses as well as compute particle acceleration on a wetted surface.

MSC Nastran 2012 also offers performance gains as great as two to three times over the 2010 version. And now here comes MSC Nastran 2012.2 with even more performance enhancements reported. For HPC (high-performance computing) productivity, MSC Nastran now takes advantage of Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) on Intel’s Sandy Bridge class processors on Windows platforms. The benefit here is that the AVX instruction set helps speed up numerically intensive applications.

Nonlinear analyses can now run in both DMP and SMP (distributed and shared-memory parallel) modes. That means improved parallel scalability for a bigger spread of nonlinear applications. It also means that you should see performance gains when leveraging the explicit solver for complex fluid structure interaction jobs.

More on MSC Nastran 2012.2 is available in today’s Pick of the Week write-up. Make sure to hit the link at the end of the write-up and go to the MSC Nastran landing page. Look for the video of what’s new on the right-hand side of your screen. Also, in the middle of the page, there’s a box of three images. Click on each image for a quick animation of some of the things you can do with 2012.2. In fact, there’s a ton of MSC Nastran knowledge for you to reap on the MSC website. So, hit the link over there now. There’s no sense in waiting. You’re not getting any younger.

Thanks,  Pal. — Lockwood

Anthony J. Lockwood
Editor at Large, Desktop Engineering

Read today’s pick of the week write-up.

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