Released CAESES 4.4.2

It’s spring time over here in Europe and we are excited to announce that the new CAESES release is out now! Even though this is formally a main­te­nance release, we have added a few new capa­bil­i­ties based on user requests from the last couple of months. Check out the changes log for all details, and browse through the picks below for an overview. Thanks to everyone who provided feedback and input for CAESES 4.4.2!

DOWNLOAD CAESES 4.4.2

Blade Sections from STL Data

CAESES offers new capa­bil­i­ties to create 3D sections from given STL blade data, e.g. from pro­pellers and tur­bo­ma­chines. The new routine inter­sects the triangle data with a cylinder surface or, alter­na­tively, with an arbi­trary stream surface. Learn more.

New Curve Features for 2D Sketches

For faster sketch­ing of para­met­ric contour curves, there are new features avail­able in the image curve menu, as well as in the circle/​ellipse and line menu. They help you to quickly create and trim curves by means of various inputs such as other curves, points, curve para­me­ters and prin­ci­pal axes.

More Controls for Inter­po­la­tion Curve

A new method attribute allows you to select between dif­fer­ent algo­rithms when inter­po­lat­ing a set of points. Since the dif­fer­ent inter­po­la­tion strate­gies result in dif­fer­ent curve shapes, it gives you more flex­i­bil­ity for the dif­fer­ent modeling situations.

As another exten­sion, you should check out the new option to provide 3D tangent vectors as addi­tional input at the start and end loca­tions of the curve. So far, only 2D angle values have been sup­ported. Since tangent vectors are easily obtained from any curve and surface, this new capa­bil­ity is useful for creating smooth tran­si­tions from adjacent geometry.

New Surface Type: Gordon Surface

In order to create a surface based on a network of given curves, you can now use the first version of the Gordon surface. This new surface type expects two ordered sets of curves from which the patch is created. Learn more.

Faster Sweep Surface Modeling

Creating and opti­miz­ing ducts, man­i­folds and channels in a fast and para­met­ric way is one of the tasks that users recently wanted to accel­er­ate. Here, we added a small but effec­tive func­tion­al­ity to quickly trans­form a 2D section into the 3D space using a path and a location. You’ll find the new feature in the image curve more menu.

Color ID and Name

Colors and IDs play a critical role in CAESES. In recent versions, there was an auto­mat­i­cally gen­er­ated color ID for each color. This ID is unique, but also pretty long and not very user-friendly in terms of keeping it in mind or taking care of it in scripts. The new CAESES version supports custom IDs for colors, as well as a custom name to option­ally replace the unique name of the color object. These two attrib­utes are used for some export formats, in par­tic­u­lar, for STL formats and the CONVERGE export.

CONVERGE Import and STL Processing

There is a new CONVERGE import avail­able for *.dat files. It reads the data and creates colors based on the indices that exist in the file. These colors are assigned to the imported surface patches and no manual color creation etc. is needed, so that the automa­tion of CONVERGE is done much faster.

The trimesh capa­bil­i­ties also received a new proces­sor to trans­late the triangle nodes of a colored patch. That makes it simple to trans­form STL data with a few clicks, e.g. changing the length of some patches, or the location of certain nodes without changing the tri­an­gu­la­tion topology (i.e., no remesh­ing of the initial tri­an­gu­lated surface).

New Opti­miza­tion Method

For highly-con­strained design spaces, CAESES 4.4.2 offers a new and effi­cient opti­miza­tion method called ​“Sim­plexer”. It uses repet­i­tive lin­eariza­tion of a non-linear objec­tive function and con­straints to be able to solve them with the linear simplex method. Check out the doc­u­men­ta­tion in the CAESES help for more details and rec­om­mended use cases.

GUI Improve­ments

We intro­duced a couple of minor GUI changes, to avoid con­fu­sion and to better support espe­cially new CAESES users in their design work­flows. For instance, the local appli­ca­tion is now the first item to con­fig­ure when setting up a com­pu­ta­tion (in earlier versions it was at the bottom of the editor), followed by argu­ments and the con­straint check. We have gone through the CAESES GUI and tuned several similar items.

And So Much More!

CAESES 4.4.2 gives you a robust geometry engine and automa­tion platform, thanks to the steady inflow of reports from active users. What else is included? There you go:

• Improved con­straint handling for Dakota opti­miza­tion engine
• Result table fixes
• Improved pausing of design engines
• Units support for the ANSYS ACT apps
• Improve­ments to the ANSYS ACT Tur­bo­Grid app
• Better per­for­mance of the GUI widgets
• Updated models for the demo section of the doc­u­men­ta­tion browser
• Many new tuto­ri­als in the included HTML help

Check out the changes log for all details and get the latest version today!

DOWNLOAD CAESES 4.4.2