Nowadays, it is commonly acceptable that industry designers need to perform some level of basic CAE simulations during a new product design, in order to simplify the product development process. If there were a tool available to designers, which could perform CAE simulation analyses and pinpoint possible significant design drawbacks, then the design evaluation iterations could be reduced drastically. However designers are not – and they should not be – experts on performing CAE simulations like FEA.
Considering the above remarks it is obvious that industry designers are in need of a special CAE software solution. This solution should look and feel as an extension of CAD software, without, of course, sacrificing important CAE capabilities. The CAD import, geometry cleanup, meshing, property definition and structure assembly should be both optimally automated and with great flexibility. The simulation part should not consume extensive amount of time, therefore novel simulation techniques should be applied for computational time minimization. Finally, the result post processing should be simplified and intuitive.