Alternative to PATRAN

[gokmavi]

Dear Forum Members,

I am working on a project of establishing a firm, which will be an engineering service provider to a major aerospace company. PATRAN/NASTRAN couple is being used by this (customer) company. Therefore, at first glance,it seems that I have to consider purchasing these products. But after a small investigation, I have seen that licence fees (1 NASTRAN + 3 PATRAN) requested by MSC becomes the most significant expense of the company that I am planning to establish. Ok, I can not avoid purchasing NASTRAN but I think that it might be possible to choose another pre/post processor. Could you give any comment about which alternatives I can think of or whether it makes sense to go in this direction.
Best Regards.

gokmavi

 

[ThomasH]

Hi

You could look at the problem in another way. Why do you use PATRAN, is it because the client requires you to deliver files in that format or is it something else?

Also, why MSC, there are other "flavours" that are priced quite different. Or is it a reguirement that you use MSC.Nastran due to that they trust it or due to some special capability?

But since you ask about pre/post. I think you could work with for example Femap and then export the model to Patran if so required.

On a different note: When searching for an alternative to Patran I would post in a more general forum, not a Patran forum.

Regards

Thomas

 

[gokmavi]

Hi Thomas,

Client does not require us any deliverable in .db format.
MSC.NASTRAN is their standard solver. No discussion on it.
I opened this thread in this forum on purpose. Because I am sick of MSC's marketing policy.

Do you have any information about aproximate price of a FEMAP licence?
(I ask this because I know that FEA software companies have hidden price list changing customer to customer & country to country)

Regards.

gokmavi

 

[ThomasH]

Hi

Since you have a purpose for using the Patran forum I won't argue.

We bought our Femap licence in a bundle with NEiNastran. That was a few years ago when MSC lost their right to resell Femap. I don't know the price for Femap today but I know its higher then at that time. I've also heard that Femap is a lot more costeffective than Patran in terms of lower price. The maintenance price I got for MSC.FEA was higher than for the bundle Femap/NEiNastrean. And MSC considered it a bargain.

I would be interesting to get some input from somebody who actually uses Patran.

Regards

Thomas

 

[gokmavi]

Once more thank you Thomas.

After a short search in internet, I have encountered a basis price of £5,000 (additional £1,000 is quoted as annual maintenance fee).

It looks like there is a significant difference with PATRAN (I hear figures over £10,000 for PATRAN).

Regards.

 

[Aerodesign]

Gokmavi,
I first established a low cost FE consultancy in 1988, at that time PDA (owner of Patran) said they would NEVER port the product to the PC platform. Similarly the FE solver products were only available for unix o/s. So we used EMRC NISA (created apparently by soem ex-PDA people), it was ported to the PC and hence we gained a significant price advantage over existing companies.

Time moves on and since then we have used other products. By far the most cost-effective is Hypermesh (

http://www.altair.com)

which is part of the Hyperworks suite.

For solvers MSC had to 'give up' (the IPR of the code) around 2003 due to a legal action. This meant that MSC, NEi (and possibly NX) Nastran were all aligned. The solution for these products was (past tense, maybe the case now). So to satisfy our clients requirement for Nastran, we had a choice.

Significantly we have found a lot of our client requirements lead us to a 'single FEM' approach, hence we want to use the same (or similar) meshes for linear static, non-linear static and explicit analyses. So we ended up with a bunch of solvers.

For a start-up company l recommend the most flexible products, so you react to your client's needs - Hypermesh and NEi Nastran could be a good start. Add LS-Dyna for an explicit solver. FEMAP is a viable alternative and can be used to generate decks for other solvers.

One thing is for sure, the MSC route is VERY expensive, the product (Patran) is poor value and lacks development and functiuonality. However, if you want to fully integrate with your client this may be the only option.

Thankfully, nearly all products are available in Linux platform, so that eliminates MS Windows costs and enables 64 bit versions with their inherent greater accuracy.

Hope this helps.

 

[Aerodesign]

The sentence shoudl have read:

..... The solution for these products was to all intent and purposes identical (past tense, maybe not the case now).

Apologies.

 

[gokmavi]

Aerodesign,

Many thanks for the valuable information. It is nice to listen experiences of the colleagues, who followed the similar path before.
I have been using PATRAN/NASTRAN for 11 years. To my opinion, PATRAN is a real disappointment story ! How a software that is paid thousands and thousands of dollars can remain without any significant improvement in 10 years, it is a real disaster. Poor compatibility with different versions, unstable working, several fundamental problems inherited from previous versions ans still waiting to be solved...
I hear very positive things about hypermesh from more and more colleagues. It seems that they started pushing MSC in Aerospace industry as well.

Best Regards.

gokmavi

 

[mscpro]

The main alternatives to Patran for pre/post-processing of Nastran models are Femap and Hypermesh. Both are usually cheaper than Patran in cost.

------
mscpro