Siemens NX 8 Includes Enhancements With Focus On CAE

Siemens PLM Software, a business unit of the Siemens Industry Automation Division has announced the latest release of NX software, the company’s fully integrated computer-aided design, manufacturing and engineering analysis (CAD/CAM/CAE) solution. NX 8 includes extensive enhancements to its CAE offering – including its widely used NX Nastran software.

“NX 8 is a significant evolution of one of the world’s premier integrated digital product development systems,” said Jim Rusk, vice president, Product Engineering Software, Siemens PLM Software. “Our unsurpassed CAE solution has been further expanded to better enable users to identify and eliminate issues in the virtual world before they become problems in the real world. This ability to optimize product performance, combined with the extensive enhancements in NX design and manufacturing, will help our customers further reduce costs, shorten development time and facilitate smarter decisions that result in better products.”

NX CAE can operate as a standalone simulation solution or as a fully integrated component of the NX product development suite. And in keeping with the Siemens PLM Software open business model, NX CAE works with virtually all leading FEA solvers as well as Siemens PLM Software’s own NX Nastran. NX CAE users can also import geometry from a variety of sources and easily modify it for rapid what-if analyses using synchronous technology, a Siemens PLM Software innovation that combines the speed and flexibility of direct modeling with the precise control of dimension driven design.

Enhancements to NX Nastran include improvements in nonlinear and dynamic analysis, as well as increases in computational performance and modeling ease-of-use. The new and existing functionality in NX CAE helps reduce the time spent preparing and solving analysis models by up to 70 percent when compared to traditional CAE tools.

NX CAE potentially changes the game for simulation,” says Dr. Keith Meintjes, Practice Manager for Simulation and Analysis at CIMdata. “NX CAE is a full suite of simulation tools, enabling multi-domain analysis and collaboration. In addition, NX CAE‘s built-in use of synchronous technology helps CAE specialists easily accept models from multiple CAD sources and quickly idealize, modify and create the geometry needed for their analyses. This brings geometry into the CAE iteration loop, enabling CAE to drive design rather than simply to respond to design models created by CAD specialists. Siemens PLM Software’s overall vision, investments, and resulting technology development roadmap for NX CAE is yielding a comprehensive, highly productive simulation and analysis environment even for companies that do not use NX as their CAD authoring tool.”

Enhancements to the NX 8 manufacturing capabilities include new or extended functionality focused on both machinery and tooling design, such as optimized NC programming for machinery and heavy equipment part production, along with improvements that combine tooling design automation with CAE-based validation tools. As a result, NX 8 can help machinery and tooling companies win more high-value projects by delivering designs that are right the first time.

NX CAM enhancements for machinery and heavy equipment extends existing CAD/CAM, programming automation, and integrated machine tool simulation capabilities with new automated, context-specific functions to simplify the generation of smart tool paths for prismatic parts. With new volume-based 2.5D milling operations for faster programming, automatic tracking of uncut material across multi-stage machining processes, and programming automation for multi-part setups, NX CAM for machinery delivers a fast and highly accurate machining solution.

Enhancements to NX 8 in the area of product design include more powerful and efficient modeling, drafting and validation solutions along with expanded HD3D support for better design decisions