Price of FEA software?

[bongirs]

Hello,

I am considering starting my FEA consultancy.
So I would like to know the prices of FEA software packages.
It would be great to understand the fixed initial seat price as well as the yearly price of the packages.
I have tried searching a lot using Google but in wain...

 

[TGS4]

Call the various software vendors. Get quotes. By this point you should know which software you are going to use (i.e. you should have 10+ years of experience in this software before hanging your own hat out there). What industry are you wanting to work in?

 

[bongirs]

I have experience using ANSYS and Creo Simulate.
My area of interest is Automotive.
Yes I have not much experience to inaugurate my consultancy tomorrow, but I am contemplating of doing so in a couple of years.
So to get a gist of the initial investment that would be required I have posted this question.
I am not fixing myself to one software as it would depend on my clients demands.
As a rough estimate I would like to know the approximate costs associated with the structural licenses of following software:
1. ANSYS
2. Abaqus
3. COMSOL Multiphysics
4. Autodesk Simulation
5. LS-DYNA

 

[TGS4]

Call the various software vendors. Get quotes.

This is proprietary information for these companies, so you will only be able to get it from them directly.

 

[rickfischer51]

Find out what software your intended customers are using and acquire that. That way you position yourself to take on routine overflow work where you build the model, run the analysis, and then transfer all the files to the customer and he takes it from there. Do a good job with that and they may give you complete projects. IF not, at least it's money coming in.

I believe ABAQUS is only available as a lease and it is very spendy. Ansys can be purchased in small chunks. You could start with Structural, then upgrade to Mechanical to get heat transfer, then upgrade to Multiphysics if the need arises nad your income stream improves. Multiphysics was about 45k$ for a perpetual license, + an annual tech support fee. I think Structural is about 19k$. Also, Ansys Design Modeler is great for fixing mutant geometry from various customers. You will likely not be able to afford or master every CAD system out there, so Design Modeler will fill that gap. LS_Dyna used to be free from Livermore, but you needed a pre/post package like Femap. Not sure how it works now. Of course, you can add ANSYS/LS-Dyna to an Ansys bundle. Autodesk Simulation is the old Algor program and is pretty low end (sorry Vince) and I would be surprised if anybody big in Detroit uses it. I've have not heard good things about it for anything other than linear static. I see that Autodesk recently acquired NEI-Nastran, so apparently they agree.

Rick Fischer
Principal Engineer
Argonne National Laboratory

 

[bongirs]

Hello Rick,

Thanks for your suggestions. I have some queries though,
If a company is already using a FEA software they must have FEA analysts to work for them.
Then why would they transfer their tasks to a 3rd party?
Is that not wasting a lot of money?

Regarding ANSYS, if I buy the perpetual license and don't take the yearly support, then can I use ANSYS forever without having to pay any more money (apart from the initial seat license fee)?

Yes I have used ANSYS Design Modeler and found it very good for correcting geometries.

Regarding Autodesk Simulation, is it not used quite a lot in the industry?
If so then it must be really cheap and lack good solvers.

Apart from all this I have one more query.
Does any company espouse a new software in the market easily especially if it is light on the pocket and has a lot of muscle power but lacks the "proven software" badge?

Thanks for your time and effort!

 

[rickfischer51]

1. You may get overflow work. The customer does not always have enough analysts and licenses to do all the work in the allotted time. He may go outside to consultants to get through a period of peak demand. If they are using Nastran, for instance, you have a better chance to get that work if you are also using Nastran.

2. You also don't get tech support, error reports, new releases, etc. Not a lot of fun when you change computers or operating system, etc.

4. Not sure what you are asking. From what I've heard, the Algor solver runs slowly and suffers convergence issues when running nonlinear. This is supposed to be why Abaqus is better than Ansys. Ansys aint bad, but Abaqus has a better nonlinear solver.

5. Nope. You get what you pay for. Also, what image do you want to send to your perspective customers? You dont want to scare off potential customers with unproven, no-name software.



Rick Fischer
Principal Engineer
Argonne National Laboratory

 

[IRstuff]

FEA is used in specific portions of the design cycle; it's therefore generally difficult to keep an FEA expert sufficiently busy, and up-to-date. Most of our FEA users are not doing FEA full-time.

A couple of your notional packages are much more industry-specific than others. I would question your depth of knowledge in any given FEA package if you presented such a list as your qualifications. If would be more impressive to me if you were a, "20-yr user of ANSYS," rather than having your experience spread out amongst 5 different packages. Assuming equal time, that would barely make you an experienced user in any of the packages. Note that you will have to bid a certain amount of hours to complete a job. The less experience you have in the package being used, the more schedule risk you incur, because you might run into issues that an experienced user could easily avoid.

TTFN
faq731-376

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Of course I can. I can do anything. I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!

 

[GregLocock]

From the perspective of a big 2 automotive OEM

"If a company is already using a FEA software they must have FEA analysts to work for them.
Then why would they transfer their tasks to a 3rd party?"

If there is a specific area of expertise that the OEM doesn't have eg I think we'd struggle with FEA of magnetic lines for a motor design, or if we are running 2 or 3 vehicle programs on top of each other, or a vehicle program suddenly needs a lot of help. In my group's case we had been unable to recruit a suitable additional head and so for a year we covered that gap with an external consultant.

"Is that not wasting a lot of money?"

Yes but if it is critical path then not doing it wastes more. To be honest my charge out rate is higher than that of the consultants, so the waste of money is not all that apparent at a program level. There are however many inefficiencies with using external contractors and those are transparent to the managers, but they are real at the working level. Even finding a suitable contractor can be hard. There are lots of nuff-nuffs who did FEA or MBD at uni and think they can do the job. They can't.

"Regarding Autodesk Simulation, is it not used quite a lot in the industry?"

Not by OEMs, perhaps by suppliers.

"Does any company espouse a new software in the market easily especially if it is light on the pocket and has a lot of muscle power but lacks the "proven software" badge?"

Yes, it is not uncommon for an OEM to attempt to get a new product reconfigured in the direction of the OEMs wants. That happens less than it used to but it is still happens. BTDT twice in 25 years.

Cheers

Greg Locock


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[glass99]

bongris: the software you are looking at is expensive. ABAQUS is approx $30k/yr. This is fine if you are using it every day, but if its only one of many expenses it can be pretty onerous. ANSYS lets you rent their software by the hour now. NEiNastran is relatively inexpensive and high powered. Its approx $25k to buy plus $5k/yr for maintenance. btw: my reference point is structural options up to the non-linear implicit transient. In the end, Strand7 actually works fine for my purposes. Its rare that i need contact surfaces or a super robust non-linear algorithm, and it only costs ~$7k to buy plus $1600/yr for maintenance. Why spend $100k+ for ABAQUS?

 

[GregLocock]

"Why spend $100k+ for ABAQUS?' because if that's what your customer wants then you won't get the work without it. I don't know if our FEA boys work like we do in MBD but our outside contacts have to use the exact same release of software as us, including patches.



Cheers

Greg Locock


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[bongirs]

Hello All,

Thanks for explaining the need of 3rd party consultants.
I am getting a grasp to some extent now, on how to run business as a consultant.
I am working as a Product Engineer (1 year experience) as of now along with handling some FEA tasks for team mates using Creo Simulate.
I hope to pursue MS in Mech with specialisation in FEA and then work as an analyst in a firm for some years to understand this arena in more depth.
Apart from that, I have to say I love developing software (as a freelance developer).
My next project is a FEA software.
After reading the suggestions I feel it may not be a good project as nobody would be interested in buying it...
Anyways Thanks again all for your kind help and guidance.

 

[glass99]

Greg: interesting that you guys are so specific about standardizing FEA software. I have run into that in CAD but not FEA.

bongirs: being a consultant offering purely FEA is a tough business. Consulting engineers generally have to be more flexible than just FEA.

 

[GregLocock]

If you are determined to write a program I suspect a dedicated package for designing and analysing rubber bushings and hydrobushes and engine mounts would have a small but lucrative market (do your research). This would have to handle non linear statics and dynamics, fluid coupling, durability, and so on.

glass99 - that's because we need to be able to run their models after they've finished with them and get exactly the same results.

Cheers

Greg Locock


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[glass99]

greg: as an aside, i totally agree about the rubber thing. Rubber gives you the ability to make compliant mechanisms, or solid state mechanisms thought of another way. Build costs can be vanishingly small compared with traditional machined spring structures. First principles FEA of rubber is painful, so some better software tools would potentially be very useful. I am using progessively more rubber bushings and washers in my glass engineering.

 

[rstupplebeen]

For full disclosure I sell Abaqus among other programs and have purchased just about every one in the past.

I suggest getting actual quotes for the packages you are interested in because these numbers are far from accurate for a 1 man shop.

I hope this helps.

Rob Stupplebeen

http://www.optimaldevice.com

 

[rickfischer51]

The reality is that when starting out, your software will be by far your single biggest expenditure. You need to be able to start small and thrifty and expand as your business grows. It would be best to do this with a single program because if there is anything a customer hates it is paying for your learning curve. The pay by the hour option with Ansys mentioned above is new to me. Sounds interesting. This plus the multi-level product structure (NLS, Structural, Mechanical, Multiphysics) gives great flexibility, and would ease the pain somewhat at start-up. Do the other codes mentioned above have anything like this?

Rick Fischer
Principal Engineer
Argonne National Laboratory

 

[glass99]

Software can be expensive, and so is the investment in your time in getting efficient at it. We are getting scaled up on Solidworks right now, and I am reminded what a big deal it is to really get into all the nitty gritty of the program to make real projects with it.

 

[glass99]

rstupplebeen: I would love to switch to Abaqus, but the price I got a few years back for the non-linear transient implicit structural package from a distributor was $30k/yr/seat. For my application, Abaqus is probably twice as good as Strand7, but its twenty times the price. Is there any hope of something closer to $5k/yr/seat?

The main things that would be valuable to us are a more stable large deformation non-linear geometry solver and nice contact surfaces.

 

[rickfischer51]

glass99: Take a look at Ansys Structural.

I'm an Ansys weenie from way back, and have never used Abaqus. I will not pretend to know which is better. But I've heard people who've used both say essentially the following: Ansys has better contact, and Abaqus has more robust solvers for really nasty problems with multiple nonlinearities. Doesnt mean Ansys will never converge, doesent mean that Abaqus sucks at contact, both are good programs. This is what I got from listening to what I considered objective and balanced discussions. Opinions are inevitably influence by the type of problems worked on and the expertise and expectations of the analyst, so one guy might get good results with Ansys where another doesn't, etc. Also, you need to look at overall useability. For instance, Ansys has DEsign Modeler, which is a great tool for importing CAD geometry from multiple sources and turning them into FE models. This would reduce(or eliminate) the number of different CAD licenses you would need.

Rick Fischer
Principal Engineer
Argonne National Laboratory