Released CAESES 4.3

With CAESES® we strive to provide you with the most robust and reliable CAD solution for auto­mated sim­u­la­tion studies. In this first 2018 release, the internal geometry engine got a major update for advanced CAD modeling of complex and chal­leng­ing shapes. In addition, we offer a new Para­solid export and a separate ANSYS add-on (ACT app) to plug CAESES® into the ANSYS Work­bench. Check out all the details — as well as impor­tant com­pat­i­bil­ity issues — and download the new version! 

Fast and Robust Geometry

The CAESES® geometry kernel received many great improve­ments both in terms of robust­ness and per­for­mance. There are also new features avail­able, such as select­ing solids based on their surface area. It allows you to always choose the same solid after the oper­a­tion ​“Solid from Inter­sec­tion”. The former default setting was an unsorted list of gen­er­ated solids where the order could poten­tially change in some sit­u­a­tions during auto­mated studies or optimizations.

The tol­er­ance handling of trimming and Boolean oper­a­tions has been improved. It provides you with a better default per­for­mance and robust­ness, so that in most sit­u­a­tions you no longer need to care too much about global tol­er­ances. See also the com­pat­i­bil­ity notes below.

In the context of curves and surfaces, check out this new feature for the inter­po­la­tion curve: In addition to a list of points to be inter­po­lated, you can also now set tangent infor­ma­tion for the inter­po­la­tion curve. For each input point, option­ally use the squared brackets for creating a list, and then add the angle in degrees right next to the point or vector. Here is an example: use “[p1,90]” for an angle of 90 degrees at the point p1 — which is shown in the fol­low­ing picture:

Para­solid Export

We are now offering a new add-on that allows you to export geometry by using the SIEMENS Para­solid format. If you are inter­ested in it, please get in touch with us.

Show Results Only On Demand

So far, design results have been auto­mat­i­cally loaded into CAESES® as soon as you click on a design in the tree or the result table. However, in sit­u­a­tions where your result data are huge (which is often the standard sit­u­a­tion of our cus­tomers), you poten­tially wait for several minutes until the data is loaded into the user inter­face. This can be annoying if you e.g. acci­den­tally click on the design, or if you only want to check the design’s vari­ables and con­straints setup.

In the new version, we decided to modify this behavior. As a new default, results are now loaded into CAESES® only on demand, which is a sub­stan­tial change. There is a new icon next to the design name to click on, which triggers the data loading. 

At the top of the GUI, there is also an addi­tional button for auto-loading of result data. It gives you the former behavior again, e.g. to still con­ve­niently browse through design results in the tree using only the arrow-keys. In this context, we have also added the Results node to the opti­miza­tion tab below the design engines, to give you quick access to this data when ana­lyz­ing gen­er­ated design can­di­dates and their results. As a con­se­quence, the design tree has been moved into a separate split window. 

Multi-Objec­tive Opti­miza­tion: Result Pool

The global opti­miza­tion method of the Dakota add-on which inter­nally is a MOGA (multi-objec­tive genetic algo­rithm) supports the re-use of existing designs. Previous runs can be option­ally included to generate the initial pop­u­la­tion of the genetic algo­rithm. This avoids expen­sive recal­cu­la­tions of designs, if there are already existing suitable designs in your project. If you deac­ti­vate this result pool option, the former behavior is given, where a random number gen­er­a­tor creates the design set for the initial pop­u­la­tion. Similar to the MOGA, the NSGA‑2 is now also able to use the result pool for all gen­er­a­tions. In previous versions, only the first gen­er­a­tion could be recycled.

Design Results Table: Fixed Column

The first column (design name) is now fixed so that you can scroll in the hor­i­zon­tal direc­tion without loosing the cor­re­spond­ing names of the designs. Objec­tive values receive a slightly darker back­ground in the table to better dis­tin­guish them from simple evaluations.

New Demo Model: Impeller

We ship a new para­met­ric geometry model of an impeller which can be used as a ref­er­ence for custom designs. The model is prepared for auto­mated studies with sim­u­la­tion tools. It contains the periodic segments of the flow domain (for CFD analysis) and of the solid domain (for struc­tural analysis).

ANSYS ACT Exten­sion and optiS­Lang Add-On

With this new CAESES® version, we are releas­ing solu­tions to seam­lessly inte­grate CAESES® with the ANSYS Work­bench and optiS­Lang. We have moved our CAESES®-ANSYS app from the beta phase into a pro­duc­tive phase: The fsc-script from CAESES® now contains addi­tional infor­ma­tion that allows ANSYS users to easily connect CAESES® to the ANSYS Work­bench, and to automate geometry gen­er­a­tion through the GUI of the ANSYS Work­bench. There is a new tutorial avail­able that explains how this inte­gra­tion works. More infor­ma­tion about this CAESES®-ANSYS app can be found in this short blog post.

The new CAESES®-optiSLang add-on is now also avail­able, to plug CAESES® into optiS­Lang. It provides fast access to the CAESES® model para­me­ters (i.e., the design vari­ables) directly within the optiS­Lang GUI with just a few clicks, to control the auto­mated geometry generation. 

Impor­tant Notes on Version Compatibility

We strive try to maintain the com­pat­i­bil­ity between dif­fer­ent CAESES® versions as much as possible. This time the update has larger enhance­ments that fix certain bugs in order to sub­stan­tially enhance the quality for gen­er­ated curves and surfaces. For some very specific existing CAESES® setups, these new enhance­ments can lead to slight changes in geometry models. The relevant issues are:

• BREP FACE/EDGE ID: The way of gen­er­at­ing face IDs for BReps has been further devel­oped. One serious issue was fixed to make sure the IDs do not change during certain model changes e.g. in auto­mated studies. If you have built up your geometry model based on face or edge IDs (e.g. by using commands such as brep.getFace(12), brep.getEdge(12)), there will possibly be a slight change of the ID ordering in this new version.
• BREP TOL­ER­ANCES: The internal handling of geo­met­ri­cal tol­er­ances (BRep attribute ​“Global Tol­er­ance”) has been improved to provide a better default value (i.e., if no value is set by the user), espe­cially for chal­leng­ing oper­a­tions. If you have been using this setting, we rec­om­mend to remove any tol­er­ance value in case your existing models do not work properly with this new version.
• OFFSET CURVE: This impor­tant curve type is used e.g. for profile and blade design, and we have improved the way of creating these offset curves. Input thick­ness dis­tri­b­u­tions — that are often provided as poly­curves — are now inter­nally checked for their con­ti­nu­ities, to auto­mat­i­cally detect blend point posi­tions and other relevant split loca­tions. As a result, this leads to better 3D surfaces, but the para­me­ter­i­za­tion of curves created with earlier CAESES® versions can be dif­fer­ent now. Addi­tion­ally, former problems in the leading edge region of 2D profiles for single-side creation could also be resolved due to this new implementation.

If you observe any problems in your existing projects or if you have ques­tions about it, please do not hesitate to get in touch with us through our helpdesk.

Changes Log and Download

All details about new features, changes and bug fixes can be found in our changes log. We rec­om­mend updating to this latest version. In order to download the new instal­la­tion package, please follow the link below: 

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