Released CAESES 4.4

We are excited to announce the new CAESES® 4.4 release, which can now be down­loaded from our website. Based on the great input and feature requests from our users and partners, the func­tion­al­ity and the result­ing benefits are con­stantly growing. This new version comes with more than 30 new major features and a new help system, while at the same time a large set of reported bugs and issues has been resolved. Some of the version high­lights are given below, feel free to get in touch with us if you have any ques­tions or comments! Update Dec 6, 2019: Version 4.4.1 is already out now! 

New Help Portal

With CAESES® 4.4, we added a first version of a new help portal, to make all essen­tials avail­able that you need to use CAESES®. You can find it in the doc­u­men­ta­tion browser. The moti­va­tion for this new help is to cen­tral­ize all doc­u­men­ta­tion in one place, and to make things easier to find for you. The new help also provides a first set of useful snippets for feature def­i­n­i­tions that can be copied and pasted into your own def­i­n­i­tions. We will continue to add content in the future (tell us what is missing!), and we look forward to receiv­ing your general feedback on it.

Robust Variant Creation of Complex Geometries

The entire geometry engine of CAESES® has been improved to provide faster and more robust geometry oper­a­tions. Based on test cases from our cus­tomers, the algo­rithms for Boolean Oper­a­tions and fil­let­ing have been further devel­oped. This effort con­tin­ues to ensure that the geome­tries of complex models do not break or fail to regen­er­ate within auto­mated design studies.

Effi­cient Ren­der­ing of Larger Models

The ren­der­ing and nav­i­ga­tion (zoom, rotation, trans­la­tion) in the 3D view have been accel­er­ated. So far, models with a large amount of data (e.g. from imported data or complex para­met­ric models) showed a slow response in the 3D view. By using a com­pletely new approach to render and visu­al­ize the data, this behavior is now sub­stan­tially improved so that working with huge amounts of data is more fun again.

Selec­tion and Transparency

When select­ing an object (e.g. point, curve, surface, BRep) in the tree or in the 3D view, all other objects are now set to trans­par­ent. As a result, it is much easier to detect which object was selected. In addition, it is also easier to inves­ti­gate the selected geometry because it is no longer hidden behind other non-selected objects.

Patch Pre-Pro­cess­ing

This is a new feature which will really excite users that need STL output: Indi­vid­ual patch settings for BReps as a one-time pre-pro­cess­ing step for all variants. Users can override the global settings for the color and the tri­an­gu­la­tion. Just choose the edit mode of the BRep, select a patch and apply your indi­vid­ual settings. All these settings are prop­a­gated down to the exported STL file. This means that even sub­se­quent oper­a­tions (add sources, trimming, inter­sec­tions, etc.) will maintain these settings. You can still use global tol­er­ances e.g. for the tri­an­gu­la­tion accuracy and the colors, but your indi­vid­ual local setting will still be there. As a result, you have more control and you can have a higher accuracy for critical, highly curved regions while not sub­stan­tially increas­ing the total amount of data. 

Video

Find more details in the video that demon­strates this new functionality.

BRep Healing

Some new healing options are now part of the BRep add sources oper­a­tion. These healing options can fix the topology of ​“unclean” BReps by inter­nally applying snapping mech­a­nisms. ​“Unclean” means that corners or edges of adjacent geometry patches do not coincide exactly even though it looks like they are matching, as long as you do not zoom into the details. Such numer­i­cal arti­facts have been observed in imported files from other CAD systems. In par­tic­u­lar, and as a request from our maritime cus­tomers, the new healing capa­bil­i­ties work well for ship hull geome­tries that are exported by the NAPA software. See also this blog post about flow domains for NAPA geome­tries for some more information.

Auto­mated Mesh Deformation

The process automa­tion has been extended to let users work with ANSYS Fluent meshes. These *.msh files are now sup­ported in the software con­nec­tor, and they can be imported and used for shape opti­miza­tion by applying the Free-Form Defor­ma­tion or other shift trans­for­ma­tions of CAESES®. The software con­nec­tor offers a new pos­si­bil­ity to choose a Data Con­nec­tion whose deformed data will be auto­mat­i­cally exported in an opti­miza­tion loop. Besides the Fluent mesh file format, the open-source format *.vtk (The Visu­al­iza­tion Toolkit) is also sup­ported in CAESES® 4.4. More formats are on their way!

New Surface Features

With version 4.4, you can now consider deriv­a­tive infor­ma­tion from the adjacent surfaces when creating a Coons Patch or a Lofted Surface. When creating a Coons Patch, you need to provide surface curves such as the surface edges from the 4 outer surfaces. The Coons Patch auto­mat­i­cally computes the deriv­a­tives based on this input and gen­er­ates a smooth tran­si­tion to these surfaces. In the context of Lofted Surfaces (i.e. skinning cross-section curves), deriv­a­tive infor­ma­tion can be included at the start and end cross section to further control the tran­si­tion and the shape of the lofted surface. This infor­ma­tion is col­lected from two adjacent input surfaces that are now addi­tional input prop­er­ties. This new capa­bil­ity can be combined with the use of rail curves as further control for the surface gen­er­a­tion process.

Expres­sions in the FSC File

All depen­den­cies and expres­sions can be written into the fsc-file that is used for the batch mode run of CAESES®. With this, users can run and control a CAESES® project without using the graph­i­cal user inter­face at all. This is handy for making some very quick changes to the project without starting up the user inter­face. In order to write these para­me­ters into the fsc-file, activate the new option under projects > exports > exportFSC.

Improved Usabil­ity

Based on the wishes from our users that we reg­u­larly receive, e.g. through the helpdesk and the forum, we have added several nice-to-have features such as con­ve­nient geometry creator commands and new GUI widgets. For instance, since setting colors for surfaces is such an essen­tial task in CAESES® (to prepare them for auto­mated meshing with fixed IDs), a missing color picker tool was added to the color object:

Faster Access to Display Options

Some of the fre­quently used display options now have a separate icon for faster access. This includes dis­play­ing the control net of the under­ly­ing NURBS rep­re­sen­ta­tion for curves, surfaces and BReps as well as visu­al­iza­tion of BRep edges (open edges vs. all edges using a red/​green color). There is also the new option to show the edges of a BRep in a grey color, which gives you a cleaner view if you do not need the edge checks or if you want to create screenshots.

Update of the ANSYS App

The CAESES® geometry engine (to inte­grate CAESES® into the ANSYS Work­bench) has been updated where a major feature could be added. In the previous version, the surface colors were trans­ferred with their color codes, i.e., the color codes appeared as the Named Selec­tions. In this new version, the name that you set in CAESES® finally shows up in the user inter­face of the ANSYS Work­bench. For instance, if you tagged one of your surfaces as ​“io_​inlet” (through creating a color with this name), this name will appear again as the Named Selec­tion. In addition, you can also manip­u­late the geometry in the ANSYS Design­Mod­eler, and the automa­tion will still work which was not possible with the previous CAESES® app.

CAESES Tur­bo­Grid Engine

Another high­light in the context of our col­lab­o­ra­tion with ANSYS is the beta release of the CAESES® Tur­bo­Grid Engine App. This new ANSYS app allows you to use your para­met­ric CAESES® blade model within the ANSYS Work­bench for auto­mated meshing with ANSYS Tur­bo­Grid. There is a short tutorial in the doc­u­men­ta­tion browser that explains how it works. The new inte­gra­tion is highly stream­lined so that it takes only a couple of clicks to automate the blade design process!

Optimus Inte­gra­tion

The con­nec­tion between CAESES® and the Noesis software solution Optimus has been further improved to inte­grate CAESES® into the user inter­face of Optimus. All you need for Optimus is the fsc-file for the batch mode run of CAESES®, and Optimus will show all design vari­ables along with their lower and upper bounds. Simply drag & drop the CAESES® icon within the Optimus user inter­face into the Optimus work space to inte­grate, con­fig­ure and run CAESES®. More details are coming up soon!

Changes Log and Download

All details of the new version can be found in our changes log. If you observe any issues or problems, please get in touch with us through the helpdesk.

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