The purpose of this paper is to provide an insight into the expected level of accuracy a designer can expect to obtain with the “designer orientated” codes that are currently being marketed. The “designer oriented” tools that are currently being marketed are built to tackle complex products but the approach taken here has been to keep the test cases simple. When a complex test case is used it often obscures the behaviour of the analysis method and by stepping back and using simple test cases we can truly see how accurate these methods are.

The paper includes evaluations of the accuracy of the SimSolid tool by Altair and the MeshFree tool by Midas IT.

The white paper is intended to be updated as additional designer oriented codes are evaluated. If you would like you code to be evaluated and included in this white paper contact technical@nafems.org.