As a SolidWorks® user, you appreciate the ease-of-use, integration, productivity and communication tools that let you produce high quality, accurate designs and get them to market faster. Similarly, you want your FEA software to provide the same benefits in the area of engineering analysis and simulation. You want to gain insight into different aspects of your design – structural, thermal, dynamic – and verify critical design elements on your desktop before you commit resources to expensive and time consuming prototypes and test programs.

Nastran is the most widely used FEA software in the world. It has been proven over several decades and has become the established standard in aerospace, automotive and maritime industries. However, for most of its history, Nastran FEA has been a tool confined to high end analysis in very large corporations because of the cost and sophistication of the hardware and software.

Now Noran Engineering, Inc. (NEi) has developed a product strategy that allows Nastran FEA technology to move in a different direction making it affordable, easier to use, and accessible to a much wider engineering and design community.

NEiWorks, Embedded Nastran FEA for SolidWorks

NEiWorks is a breakthrough product. Embedded in SolidWorks, NEiWorks is able to integrate all the comprehensive high end FEA capabilities of NEiNastran with 3D solid modeling. NEiWorks retains the same look-and-feel, menu, and tree type structures of SolidWorks. Users experience the familiar environment and ease of use they have come to expect while getting a comprehensive range of new engineering analysis capabilities.

With NEiWorks you can start with linear static and move up to highly advanced nonlinear and transient analysis or virtual simulation of structural, thermal and dynamic problems.

Plus, NEiWorks can share results with the entire community of Nastran users, like NEi, NX and MSC using text files for input data and results via standard OP2 format – an important consideration if you need to work with customers, suppliers or design partners using Nastran.

NEiWorks Basic

One of the most common types of analysis needed by design engineers is linear static analysis. By far, linear static structural analysis represents the majority of the analyses performed. NEiWorks Basic makes this type of analysis easy to do. Starting with your SolidWorks part, loads and boundary conditions are applied using a series of pull down menus to define the force or pressure on the structure and the direction. Similarly, constraints are defined.

The material is then selected from a material library or you can define a material by entering appropriate properties, including orthotropic materials and composites.

The part is meshed automatically with provisions for manual control. Results can be displayed in a wide variety of formats from contour plots of stress, strain and displacement, to graphical outputs, tabular data listings, and animations. Context sensitive Help is available to assist you at every step.

In addition to structural analysis, NEiWorks Basic lets you perform heat transfer analysis providing temperature and heat flux plots. Modal analysis is also included which is used to reveal vibrations in structures.

NEiWorks Expert

NEiWorks Expert brings high end Nastran FEA to SolidWorks users and to experienced Nastran analysts who are looking for the next generation in innovative pre and post processing capabilities. NEiWorks Expert also includes a number of features that will appeal to experienced Nastran FEA analysts.

The 3D Surface Contact capabilities greatly simplify this type of commonly needed analysis. The industry unique Editor feature boosts productivity, saves time and frustration in setting up solutions and simplifies problem set-up by providing control of program operation, model editing, trade off study generation, and results analysis.

NEiWorks' Cause, Action, Remarks formatted error and warning messages make it easy to diagnose and quickly correct model errors. It is a welcomed change from cryptic and obscure error messages that can make software frustrating and unnecessarily difficult.

Additionally, NEiWorks is highly affordable. You get the most FEA for your budget with discounts for multiple seat installations, the ability to share solvers in network installations, and the ability to run SolidWorks simultaneously with the NEiNastran solver.