Is Pro/Mechanica a good analisys tool?

[crguzman]

Five months ago, our company purchased the sw Pro/E, for geometrical
modeling of parts and machines, also for motion analisys. Now we are
thinking about including the FEA in our services (for designing steel
machine parts), but we don't have any references about the accuracy of
the finite element method that the Pro/Mechabica performs.

Can you help me to know If we got a good tool, or we must use other program (I-deas, nastran, samcef) as solver?.

Thanks.

 

[Israr]

If your materials are linear then Pro/Mechanica is a very good tool for analysis, especially for large assembly structures.


I have used bth Mechanica and ANSYS but the results of Mechanica are quick and accuracy same.


Israr

 

[crguzman]

Thanks, Israr. I really appreciate your opinion.

 

[slashct]

Cristian,


I have used Mechanica from when PTC first purchased it, we were looking at the software before PTC purchased the company. As well I have used Cosmos, I found that Cosmos is good for a few things, it a has come along way, and the reason we went to mechanica was for additional functionality (years ago).
Any FEA software is as good as the person driving it, each has limitations and you have to know how to set up the problem. Everyone has their personal preference, I have worked in a large company that had Ansys, Ideas, Mechanica,and Patran. Each group used something different, but the results were all close, it depends on the accuracy you need. If you need to get inside the ball park Mechanica is a good choice, if your doing precision optics and other high accuracyitems I would look at Patran or ansys. Mind you thesemuch more intensive and require quite a bit of training, also the cost is quite a bit more.
On a second note, we had a part that someone spent a week in Solid Works and Cosmos trying to run an analyze, cosmos would get stuck after 7 hours or so. Imodeled the part in ProE and than ran the analysis on it, took me some time to model the part, Mechanica did the analysis in just over 2 minutes. We have been pretty happy with Mechanica, and when it requires additional we have a license of Patran.
Edited by: slashct

 

[Israr]

Very good opinion by slashct Mechanica for general purpose and Patran for specific problems. I would like to add my recommended combinaton. We mainly use Mechanica and at times use ANSYS Workbench 10 when Mechanica stucks but these are very few occasions.


Israr

 

[crguzman]

Thanks. In these days i have been working with mechanica. It

 

[mch]

Cristian,


The reason that mesh control is not so important in Mechanica is due to the different type of element that it uses. Unlike conventional FE, where the element size mush be carefully controlled, and refined where necessary to obtain good convergence, Mechanica uses elements that can vary their stress shape function to obtain convergence. This means that as well as being unnecessary to re-mesh to obtain convergence, the element creation limits are very much wider than conventional elements. Also Mechanica checks the element quality as it is meshing, so poor (ill-conditioned) elements are virtually impossible to get in Mechanica. All of these points make Mechanica a very useful tool for the analyst and the fact that it's easy to use and well integrated with Pro/Engineer are a bonus when it comes to carrying out structural analyses of complex assemblies.


Also I have found that Cosmos is particularly slow at converging, which is very dangerous for the novice user. I would say you would need at least 7 iterations before getting a comparable result to Mechanica

 

[ghareeb98]

Guzman, You can have some control over the mesh by using seed points (adding datum points to surfaces or edges of interest) and by changing AutoGEM settings. When I used to support ProM , I often heard my customers say what others mentioned above; ProM is good for ball park or initial calculations. More like a design tool, but not for detailed analysis. However, I found many users prefer it for ease of use. My 2 cents.