MSC Software Corporation, the leader in multidiscipline simulation solutions that accelerate product innovation, announced the release Patran 2013 , its most widely used pre/post-processing software for Finite Element Analysis (FEA).

Patran 2013 delivers several ease of use enhancements for structural analysis and durability applications in aerospace, automotive, and other non-transportation industries. Some of the new capabilities in this release include:

- Support for MSC Nastran 2013.1
Patran now supports the most recent version of MSC Nastran available at release time which is MSC Nastran 2013.1. This includes post-processing MASTER/DBALL, XDB, and OP2 results files generated by MSC Nastran 2013.1.

- MSC Nastran OP2 New (PARAM,POST,1) Format
Patran 2013 provides enhanced post-processing support for MSC Nastran by supporting the new OP2 (obtained using PARAM,POST,1) format. In addition to supporting Direct Results Access (DRA) attachment of the results via Patran, the file browser menus have been modified to the correct defaults which allow for OP2 import or DRA attachment. The new OP2 format supports the latest SOL400 results quantities including contact results, Nastran embedded fatigue results, and user defined service and subroutine results.

- Patran Support for MSC Nastran Embedded Fatigue (NEF)
Patran 2013 provides support for the MSC Nastran Embedded Fatigue (NEF) capabilities including fatigue materials, load event manipulation, and post-processing, which is provided for using standard MASTER/DBALL attachments, or through the new OP2 file.

- Patran Support for MSC Nastran Contact Pair Modeling
MSC Patran 2013 supports the new MSC Nastran 2013.1 contact pair user interface by providing a new Contact Pair Load and Boundary Condition (LBC) graphical user interface. The interface allows users to create contact pairs using individual contact property sets, or re-use existing interface definitions by referencing existing property sets. This capability, along with Patran’s global property editing capability, provide a powerful, scalable UI that is suited equally well to creating both individual contact pairs, and large numbers of complex contact pairs, using common properties. Along with the new contact pair user interface is a set of tools that allow users to automatically create contact bodies and contact pairs based on user-defined criteria.

- Patran Support for MSC Nastran User Defined Services / Subroutines (UDS)
This release enhances the capabilities of user defined materials. The user could define state variables for user material subroutines. More arguments are added in the UMAT and UCOHES subroutines for passing internal data, such as element Gaussian point volume, procedure phase and convergence flag. Within material user subroutines, the information of element and node as well analysis data can be obtained using utility functions. A new SCA interface is available for user to get notification from MSC Nastran when the analyzing procedure runs into the beginning and end of load case and increments. The output support of user state variables makes post-processing of state variables possible.

MSC Fatigue Enhancements

- Multi-Layer Support

Previously, MSC Fatigue could only support analysis of upper and lower surfaces of shell elements. Multi-Layered composite materials may be comprised of tens or hundreds of plies. The new multilayered element support allows the selection of top, bottom, and intermediate shell layers.

- Hot Spot Filtering
Fatigue is a highly non-linear phenomenon, as it pertains to component stresses. Much of a large FE model may not experience stresses severe enough to cause appreciable fatigue damage. For very large models, a fatigue analysis involving every entity can be time consuming with much of the results. The new hot-spot filtering methods perform the fatigue analysis in two stages: 1) a relatively low-cost stage in which more highly stressed or damaged entities are identified (hot-spots), and 2) a full-analysis stage where the hot-spot entities are subject to a full fatigue analysis.

- Multi-Layer and Duty Cycle Event Results Import
The DTLib-based fatigue results were previously being imported back to Patran via the FEF file, which only contains worst-case results and cannot handle intermediate shell layer results. A new results import capability allows fatigue results import via the FER file. This allows results at shell intermediate layers and duty cycle event results to be imported to Patran for post-processing.

- Multi-Region Seam Weld
MSC Fatigue previously only allowed the user to analyze a single weld location and type in any given analysis. This new feature contains logic to automatically locate all pertinent weld regions, based on weld type. It also allows more than a single weld to be analyzed in a single run.

- Direct Access Results
The previous versions of the DTLib-based fatigue solver were dependent on the fes file, which contains both job setup and FE results information for a single analysis and a single FE result type. A new Direct Access FE results access method allows a much more flexible approach to fatigue job configuration,including multiple Runs and multiple FE results types. The new method allows for direct access of the FE entity and results information from the Patran database or FE results files, and an intermediate file such as the fes file.

- Seam Weld Thickness Correction
Using the DTLib-based fatigue solver, a thickness (size effect) correction may be applied, based on the thickness t of each element.