What works for manufacturing companies also applies to engineering simulation software providers. In a competitive climate, we all must aim continually for innovation, listen to the voice of our customers, anticipate swiftly changing needs, identify buyer expectations and make appropriate changes. I strongly believe that the parametric licensing and capabilities newly introduced with ANSYS 14.5 are truly innovative, standing out from the rest. They could become a paradigm shift in CAE, as they will make extensive design exploration and robust design a reality.

Given the market forces for increased product performance and integrity, engineering simulation undoubtedly can help manufacturers to evaluate more design ideas and reach the “best” design, one  that works across a range of operating conditions. For that matter, many engineering simulation software providers today do offer design exploration and optimization tools. But despite the need, the adoption of these tools is relatively small. Our product manager for ANSYS DesignXplorer, Simon Pereira, regularly investigates the obstacles to further adoption, and, in each of his reports, the biggest hurdles appear to be unacceptable turnaround times, shortcomings in usability and lack of available licenses.

We have tried to overcome the first two obstacles by making advances — release over release — in ANSYS Workbench as our parametric (and persistent) CAE integration platform. At release 12.0, we automated the ability to update multiple design points (or design evaluations), but each one was running sequentially in a batch mode on a single machine. At ANSYS 13.0 we improved this with the ability to run the design points sequentially on remote hardware. However, with potentially hundreds of long-running design points, this process could be time prohibitive. Therefore, version 14.0 enabled scheduling and executing design points simultaneously through remote solve manager (RSM) and sending the individual jobs to remote hardware for execution. And with the recent release of ANSYS 14.5, we have improved RSM’s robustness, speed and usability.

So what is the real paradigm shift? We have now overcome all three obstacles (including license/cost constraints) through the introduction of a new license product deploying the continually enhanced parametric simulation technology. This new parametric HPC license amplifies your available licenses for individual applications (pre-processing, meshing, solve, HPC, post-processing), and enables simultaneous execution of multiple design points while consuming just one set of application licenses!

To learn more, view our webinar on “Explore and Improve Your Design – Faster than Ever Before with ANSYS 14.5.”