ANSYS, Inc., a global innovator of simulation software and technologies designed to optimize product development processes, today announced ANSYS 8.0, the latest version of ANSYS' industry-leading CAE simulation software platform, featuring the most comprehensive enterprise solution for multiphysics analysis as well as a new distributed solver, contact formulation, automated simulation, integration, parametric mesh capabilities and other technology advancements. "In addition to the many enhancements related to multiphysics simulation and solver performance, ANSYS 8.0 enables companies to manage and reuse legacy data," said Mike Wheeler, vice president and general manager of the Mechanical Business Unit at ANSYS, Inc. "Many CAE tools today ignore the reality that many development organizations have a tremendous amount of simulation data from previous projects. This data represents a significant financial investment and contains valuable intellectual property. In ANSYS 8.0, we now provide our customers the tools to reuse and reevaluate finite element models which will generate a greater return on their simulation data investment." Multiphysics - Multi-field Capabilities Reach Broader Base of Users and Applications In recent years, there has been an increase in the number of industries and applications needing to solve coupled physics problems. Often a user needs to include more than two physics to achieve a realistic simulation, and there is a need to facilitate coupling to external analysis codes. While ANSYS pioneered multiphysics technology in the 1980s, it continues to expand and enhance this powerful capability with its new Multi-field(TM) solver. ANSYS 8.0's Multi-field solver provides an easy-to-use framework to solve coupled-field problems in many new markets and applications where previously there have been no solutions. With this new version, ANSYS offers a general- purpose, automated sequential coupled physics solver applicable across all physics available in ANSYS Multiphysics. With the Multi-field solver, each physics can have totally independent meshes and solution settings. This allows the multiphysics problem to be divided up easily amongst single physics experts (both within a company or to external consultants). Additionally, the recent acquisition of the CFX division of AEA Technology has resulted in a joint product collaboration to develop a link between the CFX-5 product and ANSYS Multiphysics. This advancement enables seamless transfer of mechanical and thermal loads from a CFD analysis in CFX-5 to ANSYS for stress analysis. With ANSYS 8.0, companies are no longer required to depend solely on "super-users" to handle all advanced physics capabilities of ANSYS Multiphysics. Sharing the multiphysics load across several physics experts, with the Multi-field solver, results in higher quality and more accurate work combined with the benefits of vastly compressed analysis process timescales. Mechanics - Component Mode Synthesis ANSYS 8.0 includes powerful Component Mode Synthesis (CMS) features, marking ANSYS' initial offering of a capability that will grow into a broad CMS-based approach for solving large dynamic problems in the future. CMS, which is a form of substructure coupling analysis frequently employed in structural dynamics, allows one to derive the behavior of an entire assembly from its constituent components. This process saves solution time and processing resources when solving very large models. ANSYS' CMS capabilities offer additional advantages, such as: Efficiency: CMS allows one to more efficiently manage individual assemblies. For example, automobile manufacturers can create CMS files for each body part (such as hoods and door panels), then employ CMS to determine the response of the full automobile configuration equipped with various hoods and doors (by simply selecting the hood and door models archived in CAE data). Flexibility: If only a part of a large assembly must be redesigned (for example, the landing gear of an aircraft assembly), CMS provides the flexibility to modify only that component, and then perform a CMS-use pass run to obtain the response of the full model. Modularity: For a very large model where a Block Lanczos eigenvalue analysis may be impractical, CMS allows one to break up the model into smaller components and then perform the eigenvalue analysis. For example, one could break up a single model containing 10 million degrees of freedom (DOF) into 10 components, each having one million DOF. Mechanics - Contact ANSYS 8.0 now has the complete toolkit of contact formulations, allowing customers to analyze any contact situation. Two new contact formulations were added to ANSYS' already diverse offering, which included Penalty, Augmented Lagrange and multipoint constraint (MPC) contact. These new options -- Pure Lagrange Multiplier and a mixture of Lagrange Multiplier for the normal direction and penalty in the tangential direction -- are well suited for analyses where the contact penetration must be nearly zero. These applications include press fit situations, smaller assemblies and analyses where defining the contact stiffness would be problematic. Mechanics - Parallel Performance for ANSYS ANSYS 8.0 now extends distributing processing into the next generation, building on its world-class serial solvers. The ANSYS 8.0 add-on module, Parallel Performance for ANSYS, now includes four solvers -- Algebraic Multi- Grid solver (AMG), a Distributed Domain Solver (DDS), and two new solvers, the Distributed Preconditioned Conjugate Gradient solver (DPCG) and the Distributed Jacobi Conjugate Gradient solver (DJCG). The new DPCG and DJCG solvers lead the market in speed, memory efficiency and analysis types. These new solvers will enable ANSYS customers to complete more and larger analyses on time resulting in better products and time-to-market. Parametric Mesh Solutions ANSYS 8.0 includes the new ANSYS ParaMesh offering, which is designed from the ground up as a tool for taking mesh models and making them parametrically modifiable. ParaMesh permits an entirely new design cycle process. Because ParaMesh doesn't require a CAD model, but can make CAD-like modifications to nearly any existing finite element model -- such as ANSYS, NASTRAN and Patran -- the new design cycle process requires much less coordination with CAD resources, people, licenses and machines. This new design cycle, using ANSYS ParaMesh as the model modification tool, can be significantly faster than the tried-and-true CAD centric process used by many. Customers such as automotive supplier Hutchinson and steel industry leader Arcelor currently use ANSYS ParaMesh technology to improve their design processes with quick evaluations of multiple design alternatives. "Any customer with large models, complicated geometry clean up requirements, or multiple design iterations stands to benefit from the exciting new technology found in ANSYS ParaMesh," said Steve Pilz, product manager at ANSYS. "The response has been tremendous from companies who are seeking ways to aggressively streamline their process and become the dominant company in their market." Workbench Integration Enables Greater Automation ANSYS 8.0 builds on its Workbench integration capabilities, featuring advances like pretension bolt loads, hex dominant meshing and mixed contact. ANSYS 8.0's mixed contact formulation capabilities give users the ability to automatically create and more rapidly modify virtually any type of contact for surface and solid geometries. "With the launch of ANSYS 8.0, we are reaffirming our continued leadership as a driving force for technology innovation in CAE simulation," said Jim Cashman, president and CEO of ANSYS. "With this latest version of our CAE simulation platform, ANSYS is delivering simulation and analysis advances that enable users to improve the speed, quality and cost-effectiveness of product design."