Using automation to simplify and scale finite element analysis postprocessing

About the customer

Northrop Grumman Systems Corporation (NGSC) is an American global leader in innovation and technology for aerospace and defense. Located in Sunnyvale, California, the marine systems division is a leader in the design, development and production of advanced naval systems.

Their challenge

The current postprocessing workflow entailed manually calculating combined stresses from Simcenter™ NASTRAN software results. This task was especially time consuming because some system level models contained hundreds of 1D beam elements with varying cross-sections, and each type of 1D beam required their own set of calculations. The task was to automate this workflow so time was saved and errors minimized with simple user inputs and to scale the process to allow a variety of models (for example, cross-sections) to be postprocessed.

Automated workflow.

Our solution

Siemens and NGSC engineer’s collaboration to address this task began with a discussion of the current workflow, identification of pain points and sharing of the necessary materials (for example, equations, sample Simcenter NASTRAN models and results). Based on this, Siemens engineers determined which solution would best address the pain points and objectives. Simcenter™ Compose™ software was selected because of its broad library of finite element analysis (FEA) results readers. They were based on the readers developed for Simcenter Hyperview™ software and Simcenter Hypergraph™ software – and the community’s familiarity with the Open Matrix Language, an opensource computation programming language that leverages the same syntax as GNU Octave and similar software.

“The Simcenter Compose script allowed a more streamlined, flexible and simplified workflow for postprocessing beam stress results, providing the ability to generate stress reports and present large amounts of information in a simplified format,” says Doug Beattie, senior principal structural engineer, Northrop Grumman Systems Corporation – Marine Systems.

Simcenter is part of the Siemens Xcelerator business platform of software, hardware and services.

A template script was provided to the NGSC team, which read in their model and results files (the “readbdf” command was used), modified the data per the provided engineering equations, and output a custom results file that could be visualized in Simcenter Hyperview. With a little more collaboration, NGSC engineers were able
to modify, expand and apply the script to their production level postprocessing.

Example of script shown in Simcenter Compose.

Results

Using Simcenter Compose enables NGSC to quickly read FEA results, process and manipulate the data based on the defined operations and output new results. These may also be visualized in other Siemens solutions – Simcenter Hyperview or Simcenter Hypergraph. As a result, all the pain points and goals were addressed.

Furthermore, the script is editable, the solution is repeatable and errors can be more easily identified. It is a success because through collaboration pain points and objectives were clarified, the correct solution was identified early on, and both Siemens and NGSC engineers remained in regular communication.

Sample model visualized in Simcenter Hyperview.