Geometry for Robust Variation

CAESES^®‘ foundation is a powerful and flexible parametric 3D modeler. It is your perfect choice if you need reliable and efficient geometry models for conducting automated studies with your simulation tools.

Unlike traditional CAD tools, the main focus of CAESES^® is the smart design and robust variation of complex flow-exposed surfaces – no matter if you cope with internal or external flows.

Through the dependency-based modeling approach the geometry will never break or fail to regenerate.

Applications

CAESES^® is a generalized solution for any product that needs to be improved and optimized in terms of the flow or even the structural performance. Examples are volutes, pumps, ship hulls, aircraft wings, arbitrarily shaped ducts, powertrain components, casings, mixers, turbomachinery blades, fans, turbines, etc.

Video

Watch this very short CAESES^® video which shows how geometry variables are changed to modify the shape. The design variables of a model are listed in a separate editor, and the values are changed through convenient sliders with lower and upper bounds.

Efficient Variable Geometry

CAESES^® gives you powerful surface generation tools, such as meta surfaces, to create an efficient variable geometry model for optimization purposes. These surface techniques can incorporate all your flow-related ideas so that you can make use of your experience and domain expertise.

Complex Free-Form Surfaces

If your existing CAD system has issues with the automated generation of complex solids, try out CAESES^®. It starts where other systems reach their limitation with automation!

Geometry Constraints

CAESES^® models automatically fulfill all required geometry constraints, such as manufacturing restrictions, packaging, cross-sectional areas, volumes, centroids, A/R ratios, etc. With this, you make sure that only feasible designs are created during automated studies. For this purpose, CAESES^® offers the use of optimization methods within the scripting environment so that any constraint can be realized, for any application.

Save Months of Design Time

With a smarter and robust surface parameterization, you can drastically reduce the manual work and also bring down your total numbers of free variables, which saves you time within simulation-driven shape optimizations. CAESES^® users can save up to several months through benefiting from the right geometry representation (read this case study).

By using CAESES^®, we could massively bring down our design cycle from several months to only a few weeks.

— Nicolas Lachenmaier, Engineer for Fluid Dynamics and Thermal Analysis, MTU Friedrichshafen

Why CAESES for CAD?

You can use CAESES^® as your primary CAD engine, or as an upfront CAD tool in a collaborative and integrated way with traditional design and production CAD (e.g. CATIA, NX, Pro/E, SolidWorks). These traditional tools, although powerful, are detail-oriented and encompass features which may not be relevant for simulation. Most important, CAESES^® has its full focus on robustly automating the geometry generation, for which a dependency-based model hierarchy is used.

Use a lightweight and flexible geometry model for automated processes in the pre-CAD stage.

CAD Capabilities

The curve and surface modeling capabilities are based on a powerful object-oriented approach which is handed over to you in a great and intuitive graphical user interface. Even though most users work in this graphical user interface, each design step can be fully scripted and automated. CAESES^®  also provides geometry and mesh morphing capabilities.

The following CAD capabilities are provided:

• Parametric 2D sketches and full-blown 3D modeling
• Innovative surfaces techniques for sweeps with custom parameter distributions
• NURBS curves and surfaces
• Bézier curves
• Intersection and projection curves/points
• Mathematical curves such as polynomials or trigonometric functions
• Specialized and fairness optimized curves for intuitive 2D modeling
• NACA curves
• Developable surface
• Boolean Operations for solid objects (union, intersection etc.)
• Fillet modeling such as constant and variable radius fillets between two surfaces
• Surface triangulation control with snapping mechanisms for creation of closed STLs
• Common imports and exports (IGES, Colored STL, STEP, Parasolid, ACIS, DXF, VTK)
• Specialized and proprietary export formats for meshing and CFD tools (write your own formats in CAESES^®)
• Mapping of 2D sections onto 3D stream surfaces for blade design
• Section generation for e.g. hydrostatic calculations in ship design
• Full scripting/automation of geometry-related tasks, incl. batch mode

Made for Many Industries

Simulation gets applied in many different engineering fields. The generalized geometry capabilities of CAESES^® are not limited to a specific industry or application. There are also add-ons available that extend the functionality by industry-specific tools such as parametric blade and ship hull design. Check the application-specific information for more details in your engineering context.

Ship Hull Form Design

CAESES^® provides a specialized set of design capabilities to create and optimize any kinds of ship vessels. See the marine section for more information.

Blade Design

For maritime propeller design, please see the propeller design page. Information about the parametric design of turbomachinery and pump blades can be found in this section.

Volute Design

CAESES^® provides specialized capabilities for volute modeling, as given in pumps or turbochargers. Check out this overview for the design and optimization of volutes with CAESES.

Pump Design

By combining the blade and volute design capabilities of CAESES^®, you have everything in place for advanced pump design and optimization.

ANSYS Workbench Integration

For ANSYS users, there is a CAESES^® add-in available for the ANSYS Workbench, to run the CAESES^® geometry models in the background of the workbench. With this add-in, you can control and vary all the design variables from within the ANSYS Workbench user interface, without jumping back to the CAESES^® user interface. More information can be found in the article “Shape Optimization in ANSYS with CAESES“.

NEXT: SIMULATION-READY GEOMETRY