Released CAESES 4.2

We have released version 4.2 of our geometry modeling and opti­miza­tion software CAESES®. All details about new features, changes and bug fixes can be found in our changes log. Check out some of the high­lights below! 

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Sliders for Design Variables

This has been on our list for quite a while, and now it’s ready: Sliders for design vari­ables! You can specify lower and upper bounds for your design vari­ables as well as a default value for reset­ting. This is a great feature when setting up models so that you can quickly check vari­a­tions and the feasible range inter­ac­tively. In addition, these lower and upper bounds are auto­mat­i­cally set at the design engines (algo­rithms) when you choose a new design variable. This dras­ti­cally accel­er­ates the opti­miza­tion setup process, par­tic­u­larly if you have many design vari­ables that you add to a design engine. In order to set the lower and upper bounds, just watch out for the new edit icon next to the value of the design variable.

Quick Access to Design Variables

This is some­thing you will love: The design node (e.g. baseline) and each scope now contain infor­ma­tion about your design vari­ables and para­me­ters that exist in the child tree nodes. The vari­ables are sorted accord­ing to their scope. This makes it very easy to change the impor­tant vari­ables of your model right away, at the top level of the project. You don’t have to search for your vari­ables anymore in the depths of your project — just click on the parent nodes to check their content. An indi­ca­tor (grey para­me­ter icon) in the tree shows you whether vari­ables exist in the scope. You can choose to show design vari­ables or also para­me­ters, and you can even edit the bounds of the design vari­ables in this inter­face. These options are given in the header of the widget. This new and quick overview is ideal to test the bounds of your model and to adjust them in a fast and con­ve­nient way.

The design node now shows the project design vari­ables for quick access[/caption] Here is a short video that shows these sliders in action:

Review of Advanced Opti­miza­tion Methods

We have also reviewed the algo­rithms of our advanced opti­miza­tion add-on. The response surface methods have been improved for finding a global optimum of expen­sive engi­neer­ing appli­ca­tions. We have also added a method to run several local opti­miza­tions at the same time from dif­fer­ent starting points. This allows you to make exten­sive use of your HPC resources by running these kinds of opti­miza­tions in full parallel mode.

Robust Geometry Operations

We have had a full review of the core methods in the geometry kernel of CAESES®. In par­tic­u­lar, Boolean oper­a­tions and trimming methods for the para­met­ric modeling have been further improved to be more stable during tricky vari­a­tions. There have been some more impor­tant improve­ments for the fast tri­an­gu­la­tion and water­tight BRep creation of large unclean data sets, e.g. for the import of NURBS surface patch­works with gaps and over­lap­ping regions.

CAESES Add-In for ANSYS Workbench

There is a first beta version avail­able of a new CAESES® add-in for the ANSYS Work­bench. With this you can make use of your CAESES® geome­tries in ANSYS without any script­ing — just load them with a few clicks and control the model para­me­ters directly within the ANSYS envi­ron­ment. Check out the cor­re­spond­ing tutorial in the section ​“Inte­gra­tions” of the doc­u­men­ta­tion browser. We look forward to your feedback on this — please feel free to get in touch with us if you are inter­ested in it.