Remember when you had to create a mesh of your model to run any sort of simulation? If Coreform has their way, that question may not seem so strange in a future with the old ways of FEA archived alongside fidget spinners and smartphones. It’s a new take on geometry analysis and the team behind it makes the possibilities even more convincing.
In December 2016 we learned Autodesk was ending T-splines and that former T-Splines Founder/CEO and then Autodesk Product Manager, Matt Sederberg, had a startup in his back pocket, Isogeometrx (founded in 2014), a company “dedicated to revolutionizing design and engineering in the automotive, marine, and aerospace industries by providing tools and technologies for integrated design and analysis.”
We now have a clearer picture of what that is.
Isogeometrx is now Coreform with a goal of developing high-end simulation tools based on Isogeometric Analysis (IGA). Their team is a who’s who of IGA and 3D geometry experts and researchers who have developed a proprietary analysis-suitable CAD technology called “U-splines” (“Unstructured-splines”).
Through the U-spline technology, their tools will use IGA to run simulations on the exact CAD geometry without the need to defeature and generate a mesh prior to running a simulation. To get a better understanding of what IGA does, you’ll want to read over their one-page primer on the subject. To highlight:
Traditional FEA programs require a snapshot of the CAD, often simplifying the model by removing details like holes and fillets, and freezing the model resolution at a certain tolerance by converting it to a mesh.
Since the CAE model is disconnected from the original CAD model, transferring FEA results back onto the CAD model may take just as long, if not longer, than creating the original CAE model.
In contrast to the laborious and error prone process of translating CAD into CAE models, isogeometric analysis (IGA) performs the FEA simulation directly on smooth CAD geometry.
Here’s the infographic to help explain it:
Though the concept of IGA has been around since 2005, no companies have taken advantage of the process to develop 3D CAD tools. Coreform will be the first. So if you’re tired of generating mesh after mesh after mesh, they’re one to keep an eye on.
They’re coming out of stealth, slowly, but you can find out more about what they’re up to and sign up to be notified of products on their website.
