SolidThinking has released the latest version of its Inspire software, which is aimed at allowing design engineers, product designers and architects to create and investigate structurally efficient concepts quickly and easily.
Traditional structural simulations enable engineers to check if a design will support the required loads; Inspire assists this process by generating a new material layout within a package space using the loads as an input. The company says the software is easy to learn and works with existing CAD tools to help design structural parts right the first time, reducing costs, development time, material consumption and product weight.
'SolidThinking Inspire changes the way product designers and structural engineers approach design. It enhances human creativity by proposing designs that can be evolved into a finished product and easily exported to your preferred CAD tool,' said Andy Bartels, program manager for Inspire. 'The new features in this release will allow customers to apply Inspire to an even larger set of their designs than before and make better early design decisions.'
Important new features in Inspire 9.5 include:
- Minimising mass – when running an optimisation, users can now choose to either maximise stiffness or minimise mass;
- Stress constraint – a global stress constraint can be applied to limit the maximum stress in the model during optimisation;
- Displacement constraints – displacement constraints can be applied to a model to limit deflections in desired locations and directions;
- Extrude draw direction – the new extrusion shape control generates constant cross-section topologies in a specified direction; and
- Localised language support – Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish are now supported.
