Notes from an MSC MD workshop

Happy New Year! 2011 is already shaping up to be an interesting year, so I hope you took a few days off to rest up … Just before the holiday break, I attended an all-day MD Nastran workshop put on by MSC Software in suburban Boston. We began the day with a quick overview of MSC, Nastran and MSC’s new customer support portal, SimCompanion. The presentation did a fine job of balancing the fact that MSC has a 50-year legacy of software development with the intention to be more cutting-edge and nimble, by introducing offerings such as MD Nastran. After the short intro, it was off to the races. Senior Application Engineer Dominick Lauzon explained that today’s product development processes require simulation of complex systems in many simultaneous domains and that MD Nastran can chain sequences of analyses so that the output state of one is used as input state for another. This enables optimization across a spectrum of environments, rather than just one. MD Nastran uses a single solver to integrate linear, nonlinear, crash & thermal analysis (today; M. Lauzon hinted at more coming), running a single model through many analyses. Important points: MD Nastran is backwards compatible with MSC.Nastran and takes advantage of an extensible framework to utilize in-house or other commercial codes. A bit of Nastran product mapping (what is with those solution numbers, anyway?), then the fun started. We worked our way through increasingly complex labs, setting up touching and glued contacts to model assembly stiffness; a nonlinear case with rigid contact walls, a large displacement and nonlinear material; topology and more. The labs were great — M. Lauzon walked among the students, helping and advising as needed. My classmates were current Nastran practitioners from local companies (one coming from Connecticut). They seemed most excited by the glued contact capability because of the time they will save in setting up models but also appreciated the new user interface, and the composites modeling and topology enhancements. MSC has been holding these workshops around the country, typically offering Marc, Adams and MD Nastran sessions. If you have the chance, try to attend one of these workshops; I found it incredibly useful and interesting. From all appearances, so did my classmates. Note: MSC provided attendees with handouts, lunch and an evaluation copy of MD Nastran. MSC paid no compensation for this blog post.