FEA Consuling Firm - HyperMesh

[Farhnaz000]

I am a new FEA Engineer in my company and I look for a consulting firm, that has good experience with HyperMesh.

Do you know any other potential firms beside Altair?

 

[Aerodesign]

Hi Farhnaz000,
Been using it since 1994 when it was introduced into the UK. Hyperworks suite is a top end product which has 'stolen' (don't sue me!) the market from under other software companies feet. I started a consultancy specialising in cost-effective engineering analysis in 1988, this grew in the 90's when we partnered with a division of GE and focussed on polymer product development (aerospace, automotive, consumer industry, everything). We initially chose EMRC NISA as this was closest to PDA/Patran but did not need a UNIX platform to run. The early command driven interface was rapidly replaced with a GUI and it had plenty of capability - especially for thick shell, non-linear and solid models. We also had a copy of John Klintworth's excellent draping software (which became Laminate Modeler in MSC/Patran and a bunch of other things for other companies). Finding limitations with NISA and finding we had some more money to spend we migrated to Hypermesh. The early versions were solid and worked well on PC/Win platforms, we assisted the development of the product in the UK but Altair rewarded us by taking away (note: avoiding a word which would let them sue me) our clients. Lessons learned - never tell your software supplier who you are working with!

Things moved on and so did the company, we gained our own Design Organisation Approval (DOA) as-was in the UK CAA (now EASA Part 21J approvals as DOA). At that time to be recognised as a mainstream aerospace supplier you had to use MSC Patran/Nastran (no change nowadays), so we moved away from Hyperworks (as it was now known).

Times change and MSC has somewhat belatedly noticed the SME (small medium enterprise) market (which Altair were so successful in penetrating) - hence they have a new product called MSC APEX. I would encourage people to take a look at this as, in time, it will be all-things-to-all-men. Currently available in a couple of versions with different functionality, it does lack some composites support. For an SME (or even a one-man band) able to tap into the flexible MSC Token system APEX suddenly becomes well worth looking at. The development program is aggressive and MSC has dedicated division to deal with sales, aftermarket and support.

In summary - Hypermesh is great and has a wide automotive base along with many SME. It is pretty expensive though and the flexible licensing that Altair used to offer seems to be conspicuously absent. MSC APEX is the new boy on the street but will quickly grow into a fully featured product. Take a test drive www.mscapex[dot]com.

Hope this helps answer your question.
John W

 

[Farhnaz000]

John W,

Are you a consulting firm with comprehensive Hypermesh experience?