Simulate Large Models Under Nonlinear Response

By DE Editors

NEi Software (Westminster, CA) has enhanced its product suite with NEi Explicit, a new a explicit dynamics application that extends the capabilities of the company’s NEi Nastran FEA (finite element analysis) solver by offering capabilities to simulate extremely large models undergoing highly nonlinear response. NEi Explicit, a parallel solver that integrates with the NEi Nastran environment seamlessly, enables solving short-duration problems exhibiting extreme nonlinear material response and extremely large deformations, such as high-speed impacts where the duration of the event is typically measured in milliseconds or even microseconds.

NEi Explicit offers capabilities for efficiently solving problems involving transient explicit dynamics, material models, steady state heat transfers, and contact modeling. To handle such phenomena, NEi Explicit’s dynamics algorithm does not deploy a traditional equation solver that works out a large set of equations. Rather, NEi Explicit takes a very large number of small time steps (typically thousands of time steps) where each time step is computationally very efficient. A time step is “explicit” in that the solver can predict the motion of the body from all the information known at the beginning of the time step.

The NEi Explicit dynamics algorithm does not form element stiffness matrices nor does it have a global stiffness matrix. It has an extremely small memory footprint, which means that you can solve problems with millions of degrees of freedom on a PC with a single processor. However, NEi Explicit also provides scalable parallel performance, enabling users to leverage dual and quad core processors.

NEi Software has introduced options to automatically define contact conditions in the model and continuously monitor the motion of the model’s parts. Parts can contact one another and separate with no restrictions on the size of the deformations or the rigid body rotations of the model. NEi Explicit contains a full large deformation formulation accurate over the entire spectrum of small deformations to large deformations and large material rotations and shear. Among the contact modeling abilities offered are large deformation contact sliding with friction, welded contact pairs (glued), and shell/membrane surfaces including thickness offset.

General material failure and deletion options built into the NEi Explicit are said to allow sophisticated modeling of perforation and tearing of models under ballistic impact conditions. The NEi Explicit code contains a general surface erosion algorithm that automatically rebuilds the exterior surface of all parts as elements are deleted from the model when user-defined failure criteria are exceeded.

With NEi Explicit’s rigid material option you can declare a body a part rigid and NEi Explicit will automatically compute the part’s inertial properties and track the rigid body motion. Boundary conditions and initial conditions can be applied to the rigid body directly.

NEi Software says that NEi Explicit is ideally suited for such applications as projectile impact and ballistics; impact analysis for the design of sporting goods such as golf clubs, tennis rackets, and helmets and pads; as well as metal forming applications such as stamping, forming, forging,  deep drawing, and hot rolling. In addition to its full compatible with NEi Nastran input files, NEi Explicit can produce Femap output files. NEi Explicit is available for Windows and Linux platforms.

For complete details, go to the NEi Explicit page on the the web.

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