SYSWELD 2000, the welding and heat treatment simulation tool

Citation

(2002), "SYSWELD 2000, the welding and heat treatment simulation tool", Aircraft Engineering and Aerospace Technology, Vol. 74 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/aeat.2002.12774cab.011

SYSWELD 2000, the welding and heat treatment simulation tool

Keywords: Welding, Heat treatment, Simulation

ESI Group, provider of virtual prototyping solutions, recently announced the release of SYSWELD 2000. The software is said to enable users to build a compute model, simulate the heat treating process, and evaluate the influence of the process on a part's lifetime. It is thought uniquely suited to simulate continuous welding, resistance welding, quenching, induction hardening, thermo- chemical treatment and surface treatment. SYSWELD 2000's new database of engineering know-how guides the users to realistic welding and heat treatment process simulation. Other major claimed include improved case hardening simulation, steady state welding process, and faster solvers for Compaq, HP, and SGI platforms.

Dr. Ludwig Sporer, manager of Chassis Testing at BMW said, "SYSWELD gives excellent results on distortions and residual stresses, very close to real measurements. With virtual prediction of distortions and residual stresses of the welded part, we can now optimise the welding process in the early stages of prototyping."

SYSWELD 2000 includes a large database of engineering expertise that supports the user through real welding and heat treatment process simulation. This knowledge database will reportedly help users save time for setting-up welding and heat treatment simulations, and ultimately reduce the time to market by optimising quality.

Improved case hardening simulation allows users to decrease process cost and over- design, respectively taking care of lifetime and noise reduction constraints. SYSWELD 2000 is stated to have helped reduce the necessary case hardening time by a factor of 3 still keeping the limits of distortion for a gearbox component.

According to ESI the steady state welding process computation facilities have been enhanced. A steady state welding computation enables users to predict, within one computation step, all necessary data, such as temperature field, phase distributions, distortions and residual stresses. SYSWELD 2000 allows selected parts, within arbitrary structures to be declared as stationary area, providing faster distortion prediction.

In addition to the SGI solver, new fast solvers for Compaq and HP platforms are now available. Optimised solvers provided by hardware vendors are believed to speed up computation time by a factor 10, compare to hardware independent equation solvers. ESI asserts that non-linear computations options have been improved, reducing drastically simulation cost. The company also points out that thanks to code optimisation, the global performance of version 2000 has been improved by a factor of 2. SYSWELD is available on PC (Windows NT 4 and Windows 2000) and on UNIX workstations from Compaq, HP, IBM, SGI, and SUN.

Details available from: FTPB. Fax: +44 (0) 20 7235 2773; E-mail: rob.williams.ftpb@cfme-actim.com