MSC Patran / Nastran Upgrade

[JBeng00]

Hi All,

I am interested to hear your opinions on the software we are using. We have MSC.FEA on 5 machines which is a bundle of MSC.Patran + MSC.Nastran, and one copy of MSC.AFEA which is a bundle of MSC.Patran + MSC.MARC.

We are currently using MSC.FEA 2004r2 on 5 machines and MSC.AFEA 2005 on 1 machine. We rarely use AFEA since the 2005 databases are not compatible with 2004r2 which is a big driver behind wanting to update all machines.


Because of this, we are thinking of upgrading all machines to a newer version but we have had problems in the past with bugs in one of the newer versions of Nastran and as a result we are very cautious about updating all of our machines.

We are considering the following options

1) Stay on 2004r2 - Stick with what we know. Unfortunately though we cannot use the AFEA license to create compatible databases.

2) Update to 2008r2 - This version has been out for a while so hopefully any issues have already been rectified. There seems to be a few new features for creating geometry and meshing.

3)Update to the newest version, 2010 - This version has only been out a few months but has a number of new features, including a right click mouse menu. While it would be good to update to the newest version, we are a concerned with the risk involved in updating to something "new".

I am interested to hearing from anyone running any of these versions with any advice, opinions or references. In particular I would be interested to see if anyone is using the latest version of Patran/Nastran and what your thoughts are. From what I have seen, it is the first major revision of the user interface made for quite some time. Ideally we would update all machines to 2010 if we were confident that we could trust the results, so please share your thoughts.

Thank You,

Regards JB

 

[rb1957]

i'd seriously consider some other pre- post- processor other than PATRAN ... IMHO, it quite limited and clunky

 

[JBeng00]

We generally do plate models of large materials handling machines and have found Patran to meet all of our needs quite well. I know there are other tools on the market but we haven't been put in a situation where we have been limited by Patran's capabilities so we are unlikely to change. There was some talk of FEMAP but I think we are all pretty happy with MSC.FEA. In any case, when you say it is "quite limited and clunky", what software are you comparing it to? I have only really used MSC.Patran so I cant comment on any other software.



Regards JB

 

[rb1957]

i'm using FeMap and found it easy to pick up, does the things i want it to do, and i think it's much cheaper than PATRAN.

 

[k6rot]

FEMAP is much better... I agree. JBeng00 What kind of FEA work are you using it for? Civil? Aerospace? Have you tried FEMAP?

 

[JeffPW]

I've used both FEMAP and Patran for Aerospace applications. I would agree that Patran is clunky and the interface is unintuitive whereas FEMAP's Windows style interface is easier to pick up. FEMAP can be integrated with VBA although I found the documentation for this to be lacking. On the other hand, Patran's PCL is very useful for automating repetitive work. That's my two pennies worth.

Jeff W

http://www.p-over-a.co.uk