Research On The Key Technology Of Automatic CAE Analysis Process Based On HyperWorks

The traditional way of manual CAE analysis has shown its obvious drawbacks, mainly for too much repeated work and strong dependence on user's experience. On the one hand, the analyst spends a lot of time to build the finite element model and that contains too much repeated work of each analysis. On the other hand, the analysis process, model simplification and mesh processing by each analyst are different, so different results are obtained. How to improve the efficiency of CAE analysis and shorten the period of simulation analysis has become an urgent problem for enterprises to solve.HyperWorks is the most comprehensive enterprise-level CAE solutions for industry, including HyperMesh, HyperView, Radioss, OptiStruct and other modules. It provides a rich API interfaces, Tcl function librarys and system help documentations. So many domestic and abroad enterprises create their own customized CAE analysis processes by developing application-specific programs that combines their product characteristics and requirements with analysis procedures on the platform of HyperWorks. However, these processes are usually formed with Process Manager by building an analysis process tree for a certain class of problems. Each node of the tree corresponds to an operation, which could be an automatic procedure or an interactive interface for users to perform manual operations. This way standardizes and cures the whole analysis process, and improves the analysis efficiency in the certain degree. But each time the analysis still needs to be completed in sequence, and the workload is still heavy because the overall degree of automation is not high.In order to improve the efficiency of CAE analysis, we propose to build a real automatic analysis process in this thesis. Based on the research on analysis process, internal data, solver template, and application-program development techniques in HyperWorks, an automated CAE analysis framework is proposed, which supports a variety of analysis types and solvers. In the aspect of data management, all the analysis parameters are stored in txt files with a customized data format. By using the geometric region labeling method, the correspondence relationships between the parameters' names in the file and regional geometric entities are described, and the analysis objects can be obtained dynamically within the analysis process. The whole CAE analysis process is divided into several modules according to analysis types and the analysis processes for different types can be automatically formed by combining these modules. Generally, an analysis process includes steps of pre-processing, solving and post-processing, among which the pre-processing has more tasks from importing geometric model to generating finite element model, especially where mesh quality control, connection relationship creation, constraint and load definition, and other key functional modules, provide a solid foundation for the automated construction of finite element model.Based on the above research, this paper designed and developed a complete CAE automatic analysis process system, through using the Tcl/Tk script command and API interface function of HyperWorks. By reading the CAD model and the corresponding analysis parameters, it can automatically construct the finite element model, call solvers, and extract results and so on. Compared to the Process Manager method, this analysis process' s automation degree is higher, and it greatly reduces the repeated work, and shortens the analysis time. Finally, the feasibility and practicability of this method are verified by the linear static and modal analysis for the half cabin model.