Do you want to know which key features we have implemented in the previous versions? Familiarize yourself with the top new key features of each respective versions. Please note that we only provide the key features for the last three versions.
The extended Python API scripting allows the user to easily create and calculate models from scratch. It also enables for data input and output to be fully automated.
For example, Simufact Welding 2021 allows the user to automate model creation, such as the import and the positioning of his parts, the creation and the assignment of objects necessary to the process and their process definition. In addition, Simufact Welding 2021 now automatically initiates post-processing such as the creation of measuring points wherever needed, and exporting or copying results into subsequent processes. Once the results have been exported from Simufact Welding 2021, our user can analyse them without any limits using Python programming language.
Simufact Welding 2021 moves an important step forward towards automation. Our development team is about to improve and expand this even further in the future to simplify your daily work
Until now, modelling certain welds such as butt welds required for an additional software. Simufact Welding 2021 has integrated a new weld bead creation tool, that serves for a complete control over any shape of your weld beads. Whether you need to simulate square butt welds, V-butt welds or T-joints with a gap: the new weld bead creation helps you to easily, quickly and intuitively create them within one welding simulation software.
We have improved our direct energy deposition (DED) module so that users can easily create a geometry based on the trajectories after the G-Code import. Afterwards he generates the mesh for his simulation. Further enhancements improve the stability, robustness, and ease of use in both: model generation and simulation of DED processes.
Simufact has enhanced its range of applications by including a basic cost estimation module as technical preview. Users can now estimate the costs of each process variant in advance and optimize them prior to production.
The new cost estimation module makes it possible to estimate itemized and total costs of each variant. This allows the user to compare different welding processes in terms of cost. The holistic calculaton engine considers fixed costs such as maintenance and labour costs and variable costs such as material and tooling consumables and the cost of energy used.
Defining the heat source is essential for a welding simulation. Simufact Welding 2021 simplifies the heat source definition so users can focus on their process setup.
Look forward to two major updates to the heat source definition:
Use our new, quick and easy heat source definition tool to estimate the heat source dimensions and properties without spending much time and efforts for calibrating it in order to run a first-shot welding simulation.
Our user enjoys a various number of modernizations in Simufact Welding 2021: The GUI, the icons, the product window, the splash screen as well as the installation wizard.
In addition, our version numbers of any new software release have changed starting with Simufact Welding 2021. In the future, further feature packs will be referred to as 2021.1 and service packs as 2021.0.1.
Overall, 1130 improvements (new features, bug fixes, documentation and other improvements) have been incorporated in Simufact Welding 2021.
With the release of Simufact Welding 2020 users will now be able to simulate Direct Energy Deposition processes (DED). This new module inside Simufact Welding 2020 helps the user quickly and efficiently setup robust DED models in order to calculate and evaluate for stress, strain, distortion, thermal history, and hot spots during manufacturing and post processing.
The DED models utilize common robot programming such as the G-Code which allows the user to simply import existing tool paths instead of defining weld paths manually.
Video an picture - Courtesy of Fraunhofer IPK: Simulation of turbine outline - deformation
With the latest release of Simufact Welding 2020, the users are enabled to work with common robot code such as the G-Code. With this function, the software can easily process complex welding sequences that were difficult to implement manually.
Many types of G-Codes can be processed automatically and translated into welding trajectories inside the model. Also, it will be possible to identify and automatically process velocities as well as welding source status, if available. These data can be used for definition of weld paths and heat source properties.
One of the most important highlights of the latest version is the implementation of the Leblond phase transformation model which is implemented in the solver and Material GUI. The implementation allows processing of CCT data and converts it into model parameters. This allows user-defined transformation kinetics for steels.
Another highlight is the newly implemented scripting functionality based on Python that helps to script and automatize recurring activities. This is a great benefit if regularly several variants of a model are to be set up with e.g. different welding sequences or clamping conditions. The focus lies on automatically processing changes in existing models eliminating the need to manually use the GUI for it. Thus, they will save enormous time.
Additionally, Simufact Welding 2020 offers enhancements for middle and large-sized models by improving the performance of the 3D view as well as the general GUI performance. As a consequence, it makes model setup significantly faster and streamlines the workflow.
An interface was added to exchange simulation results to and from the MpCCI-Mapper, which in turn can be used to transfer properties like deformations and stresses from third party products into the welding simulation and vice versa. This allows to exchange data with Abaqus, LS-Dyna and several other products.
Another feature of the latest version is the enhanced evaluation functionality of the results. The user is now able to filter different results which allows a more qualified evaluation of the process with respect to the simulation results. The filter is also able to extract or highlight selected elements or nodes in the 3D representation of the model. During model debugging and understanding, it helps to detect several critical situations that might have occurred during the calculation process. Furthermore, a new convergence monitor helps to track the solving performance of the model and to identify possible improvements in terms of calculation time and result quality.
Simplified approaches enable users to calculate large resistance welding processes with several robots welding at the same time. Take advantage of Simufact Welding 2020 to quickly achieve needed results in terms of distortions, stresses and temperature fields.
Additionally, the possibility to use the thermal cycle approach for more than two sheets inside the weld spot is added. This provides more flexibility to the simplified modelling approach and avoids the need to use the transient solution with higher computational effort if more than two sheets are involved
Simufact Welding 8 offers Simufact’s own embedded meshing technology which usage is user-friendly and intuitive. Users can create basic geometries directly in Simufact Welding and mesh them with internal meshers that support hexahedral and tetrahedral elements as well as solid shells. The meshing technology also supports local refinement boxes, allowing to create denser meshes in weld seams or weld spots. It makes the daily work of a welding specialist more comfortable. Simufact users become advantage of the wide product range of MSC Software: Creation of large and complex models is supported by the companies owned mesher of MSC Software. Customers do not need to use third-party products for meshing large, complex welding models.
Simufact Welding 8 comes along with a widely reworked fillet generator which is now able to create meshed geometries based on quadrangular shapes including groove welds, plug welds, bead-on plate, etc. Triangle-based fillets can now be created with respect to given (uneven) leg lengths, so that the number of nodes per leg corresponds with the relation of leg length. Additionally, created mesh cross-section are visible in the generator preview window, so the mesh quality can be controlled directly here without the need to create and control meshes afterwards. This leads to better mesh quality and improves the calculation stability and also quality of results.
The recently released version of Simufact Welding 8 offers more realistic clamping tools. During the simulation clamps can be activated, deactivated or fixed in space for a certain time period. The transfer of clamp properties, such as activation or fixation time, forces, stiffness, as well as the extended creation wizard reduce the effort needed to create and configure large numbers of tools with similar properties. Especially for complex assemblies with high number of tools those new features reduce the time needed for proper model setup.
These both new features make the model setup more intuitive and make positioning of components in the model easier. Using gravity positioner Simufact Welding 8 is able to automatically calculate the behavior of a geometry falling onto other geometries under the influence of gravity. The calculation includes friction and damping and furthermore the user also controls the precision of the calculation. The bounding box positioner allows easy positioning of geometries relative to each other. From the user’s perspective, it is a usability improvement which largely reduces the time needed for preprocessing.
Simufact Welding 8 offers in its graphical interface an extended and improved functionality for the import and the export of UNV-files. Users are now more flexible while importing files from third-party products. Even if imported files are not following the UNV standard definition or include some user defined result types, import settings can now be edited and configured before importing the UNV-files into a Simufact Welding project. The new version also offers new functions for exporting UNV-files: Users can now decide if they only want to view the files in a third-party product or if they want to use them for subsequent steps such as structural analysis or NVH-analysis, in this case, results needed for further calculation are exported in integration points and can be used for following analysis steps.
The latest version of Simufact Welding provides an interactive view control widget in model and result views. The widget combines the functionality for view control (view angles, zoom, mirroring, rotations, reset to defaults) as well as view synchronization (synchronizing several views open in one project). Also, the synchronization now supports live synchronization, automatically changing view settings, result type and selected increment in all open views if those settings are changed by the user in one of the open views. Using the widget enables the user to work faster and more efficiently while evaluating the results of the simulation, comparing different models and their results. In addition, the representation of geometries in the view (mesh, solid, contours and so on) is now controllable for the complete model as well as for single geometry.
In Simufact Welding 8, users can easily compare the simulated model with a reference model (e.g. a CAD model or measured surfaces) using the “best-fit method”. In the best-fit-method the software automatically determines the position at which the deviation between both geometries is the lowest and shows this deviation in the result view. The visual presentation of the results, based on measurements, allows the user quickly assess whether the deviations are within the permissible tolerances. For this function, Simufact has integrated Hexagon’s 3DReshaper technology.
Cloud computing and HPC (high performance computing) is often used for the simulation of various numbers of models. In such cases the data needed by the solver is sent to a remote machine, where the calculation takes place. Simufact Welding 8 is now able to import result files in the GUI, sort them properly and make them available for the result evaluation.
Through the use of solid shell elements, assemblies made of thin sheets require less calculation time because the required number of elements in the model drops significantly.
The software can also convert many models with hexahedron elements into solid-shell meshes. To do this, Simufact Welding 7 checks whether clear upper and lower surfaces are present. If these specifications are identified by the conversion function, the previous hexahedron mesh can be converted to solid-shell mesh.
The parallel segment-to-segment calculation implemented in the new solver allows faster and more efficient calculation of large models with many contact surfaces. This contact description uses DDM (Domain Decomposition Method) a parallel computation framework which utilized parallel computation efficiently.
In Simufact Welding 7, Simufact introduces the simplified calculation method “Thermal Cycle” for resistance spot welding processes. This method, which is already used for other welding processes, complex and large assemblies can be calculated in a shorter computing time.
If the shape of the nugget is for example already known from process models or measurements, the user can additionally simplify the calculation by directly predefining temperatures in the nugget without previous calculation.
With a few mouse clicks, users can add new welding robots with multiple welding paths, heat sources and fillet seams to their models. This is useful when the user is confronted with many welds while simulating large structures or multi-part assemblies. The robot assistant simplifies the model set up for the user, since it can process all definition steps in one dialogue.
This new feature automatically detects the edges of a component. The automatic edge detection simplifies the work on the model and helps to avoid errors when creating welding paths on curved surfaces and edges. On top, users can create complex welding paths much easier.
Users compare their simulated model with their target design or with 3D measurement data as a reference model. They import the reference model from the measurement software into the user interface of Simufact Welding 7 and can then compare the simulated workpiece with the target design. If the engineers overlap both workpieces, they can determine the deformation. This shows the deviation between the simulated and the target design. A further functionality allows the definition of local coordinate systems by:
Using the transformation matrix, engineers can position and move the workpieces quickly and individually in the software. The user can position the same workpiece independently in several models. Contact positioner allows fast alignment of components to each other. In this way, the user saves time since manual corrections are no longer required.
The material properties influence the result quality of resistance spot welding processes by the resistances in the material. Simufact Welding 7 contains 16 common coatings, which enable the user to take into account the electrical properties of coated sheets and to further increase the quality of the simulation. No effort is required to determine the resistance data.
Simufact Welding 7 can import UNV files - improving the compatibility of the welding software with third-party software and interoperability in the process chain. The user can import result data from third parties such as from forming or casting simulation into Simufact Welding in order to edit these files or use them for subsequent calculations.
While welding large assemblies, usually several hundred clamping tools are required, which, like the welding itself, have an influence on distortions and residual stresses on the assembly. Until now, the stiffness in the clamp could be described exclusively perpendicular to the contact surface. With the implementation of the definition of clamping tools with translatory and rotational stiffness, version 7 additionally takes into account possible rotations and the movements of the tools along the surface.
Simufact Welding 6 puts a focus on reducing calculation times and enhanced options for the evaluation of simulation results (post processing).
Simufact Welding 6 fulfils the request for obtaining precise simulation result within a short calculation time. The software offers scalable calculation methods for various tasks regarding the accuracy and simulation speed. Through the introduction of further simplified calculation methods, Simufact Welding can now also be used to simulate simultaneously, several longer processes with multiple welds and several welding points.
Extensive changes in the solver have contributed to a significant improvement in the stability and speed of the simulation.
New functions make it easier for the user to evaluate the simulation results (post processing):
Post-Particle Tracking allows the user to customize the measuring point settings, after a comparison of the simulation results with the measurement data, thus the model optimization can be done much easier and faster.
During the welding process the engineer can measure and evaluate the forces on the clamping tools with the help of the Time-History-Plot function. The measurements given by this function, provide the engineer with information on the spanner-force distribution, tool displacement and other important information for the optimization of the clamping devices.
Simufact.welding 5 is more closely towards the real welding processes and comes with a new application module Resistance Spot Welding.
The cover of the new Simufact.welding 5 software box illustrates the simulation of a laser-welded gear wheel, carrier of an agricultural vehicle and a lower part of an axle.
AFS Technology
With Simufact.welding 5 Simufact determines the basis for the introduction of the already in Simufact.forming proven AFS technology (Application Function Sets). Thus the user can now also select in Simufact.welding a graphically appealing, initial selection of welding processes and types of application scenarios.
AFS Technology
With Simufact.welding 5 Simufact determines the basis for the introduction of the already in Simufact.forming proven AFS technology (Application Function Sets). Thus the user can now also select in Simufact.welding a graphically appealing, initial selection of welding processes and types of application scenarios.
Resistance Spot Welding with Simufact.welding
Simufact.welding 5 enables users to simulate resistance spot welding. The new version comes with a full electrical-thermal-metallurgical-mechanical coupled analysis. Based on that the influence of reheating and shunting effects can be modelled; electrical properties can be modelled phase-dependent. In particular the automotive manufacturing industry uses this welding process type. With Simufact.welding 5 we support the engineers in the approach.
More efficient modelling through improved user-friendliness
Apart from the introduction of process types, Simufact’s developers have made a number of improvements for the users of Simufact.welding 5. The Creation and Assignment Wizards for geometries, materials and marginal conditions allow for a faster and automated assignment of objects to the chosen processes.
Process optimization with Process Control Center (interactive Gantt diagram)
Simufact.welding employs Gantt diagrams to visualize process times. Gantt-diagrams are used in project management to visualize the time sequence of process steps as bars on a time axis. With Simufact.welding 5, a static Gantt diagram becomes an interactive Process Control Center (PCC), which can be used to optimize welding sequences, cooling and unclamping times.
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