MSC.Software Corp. has released SimOffice R2, the latest version of the company's application for computer-aided engineering (CAE). New features of the desktop-based tool including the ability to perform analyses that permit contact between product-design components, analyze components that deform beyond elastic limits, and study the behavior of components made of composite materials. Users can deploy extended finite element (FE) modeling capabilities, including the ability to assign loads, constraints and properties to FE entities and automatically create "spider"-type multi-point constraints. According to MSC.Software, SimOffice is designed for a wide range of manufacturers, from small and medium-sized businesses to larger companies that need CAE capability to meet growing customer demands. R2 works with nearly all major design systems, including those from Dassault Systemes, Pro/Engineer and UGS, and by supporting such standard computer-aided design (CAD) interchange formats as Initial Graphics Exchange Specification (IGES). SimOffice is the first CAE environment that is certified to work with Windows Vista, the vendor claimed, and is MS.Net enabled.
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