naX2ceLL: AN ADVANCED TOOL FOR ENGINEERING SIMULATION, TAKING NASTRAN RESULTS TO EXCEL CELLS

Project Information

nax2ceLL

Grant agreement ID: 728569

DOI

10.3030/728569

Project closed

EC signature date 8 June 2016

Start date 1 July 2016

End date 31 December 2016

Funded under

• SOCIETAL CHALLENGES - Smart, Green And Integrated Transport

Total cost

€ 71 429,00

EU contribution

€ 50 000,00

Coordinated by

IDAERO SL
Spain

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - nax2ceLL (naX2ceLL: AN ADVANCED TOOL FOR ENGINEERING SIMULATION, TAKING NASTRAN RESULTS TO EXCEL CELLS)

Reporting period: 2016-07-01 to 2016-12-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

What is the problem/issue being addressed?

Companies that face new developments in major industries like Automotive, Aerospace, Rail, Maritime, Heavy Industry, etc., use intensive Computer Simulation by means of Finite Elements Method (FEM) to develop new products. The final stage of this simulation process is called “Post Processing” (extraction of the simulation results from Solvers and their analyses). Surprisingly, the data results extraction is still a manual and time consuming process, also subject to the engineer’s skills and expertise.
Developments in industries using Simulation involve hundreds of simulation engineers, and it takes a long time and high costs to take the products to the market. For example, only developing a new car takes around 2 years and 1bn€, and a commercial transport aircraft takes about 5 years and 12bn€.
IDAERO, has detected the opportunity to reduce significantly the duration of the whole Simulation Process between 15% and 27%, by improving the Post Processing stage with the naX2ceLL software.
Benefits for clients will be outstanding. For instance, bringing a new aircraft 6-month sooner to the Market can result in Millions of euros of new income and a stronger competitive position.

Why is it important for society?

naX2ceLL will help to bring products to market sooner, cheaper and safer, since it will allow saving costs and time during the Computer Simulation process as well as reducing human errors.
- Direct savings due to reduction in the customer response time. We estimate a time-saving of 50% in the Post Processing Work and 15 - 27% in the whole Simulation Process. This implies acceleration of the time to market of a product and cost savings (from hundreds to thousands) of engineering hours for the naX2ceLL end users. Incredible speed of execution, so companies that use it will become more competitive, and will put products into the market earlier.
- Indirect savings in expensive commercial licenses needed for post-processing. It is expected fewer use of them. Reduction in the time and costs of usage of Commercial grade expensive Post Processing software,., since allows direct readings of the different parameters employed for the calculation of the structure.
- Reduction in human errors. The post-processing work is carried out in a more automatedway.
- Savings in Power consumption, due to the implementation of less CPU and time consuming process.
- EU will reinforce its position in the development of Simulation SW, and will benefit of income due to this technological development.


What are the overall objectives?

The main overall of the project are:
- To develop naX2ceLL, a powerful postprocessing software platform that helps companies to bring products to Market Sooner, Cheaper and Safer.
- To develop completely all related activities like dissemination, certification, IPR, etc. that can guarantee the commercial success of naX2ceLL.
- To increase IDAERO’s yearly turnover by 6.4M€/year in 5 years, and create 14 new direct FTEs.
- To improve EU position in developing Simulation Software, and Income coming from technological developments.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

During the six-month period of development of the project, the Feasibility Study of naX2ceLL has been conducted exploring and assessing the technical feasibility and commercial potential of the innovative software that IDAERO wants to place on the market. A Business Plan has been provided.
1) STUDY OF THE TECHNICAL VIABILITY. The nax2CeLL Programming environment was positively selected and validated. The prototype was successfully deployed and tested in the reference client’s environment in terms of robustness, usability, benchmarks and feedbacks. It can be concluded that naX2ceLL Platform can be successfully developed by IDAERO.
Furthermore, IDAERO performed additional tests to extend the original scope, that will allow naX2ceLL being addressable to a broader market of users worldwide.
Additionally, from this feasibility study it can be concluded outstandingly that naX2ceLL can be and will be developed not only for one solver but for four solvers, and can add a lot of new useful functions for users, and new powerful capabilities like visualization module.
This ambitious approach will bring a lot of new useful features that allow naX2ceLL reaching a broader market.
2) STUDY OF THE ECONOMIC VIABILITY, which assesses the commercial potential of naX2ceLL through a market study and a cost-benefit analysis of the commercialization of naX2ceLL. The Economic Study shows favourable figures, with a forecast of revenue of 17.4M € during 2019-2023.
The market of Simulation Software by means of FEA comprises main industries such as Aerospace, Automotive, etc., with a turnover estimated at 1bn$, growing at 13.03% CAGR. naX2ceLL addresses approximately 80% of this market, that is 1.3M users by 2020.
Competitors are specialized, but do not have solutions with the unique features of naX2ceLL.
The Business Plan shows that project is economically and financially viable. Benefits for IDAERO will be high increases in turnover, and company organic growth with stable Full Time Employment creation. Benefits for users of naX2ceLL will be bringing products to market sooner, cheaper and safer. Benefits for EU will be FTE creation, income, and improving worldwide position in development of FEA Simulation Software.
3) STUDY OF THE LEGAL FEASIBILITY, which addresses the legal requirements to be fulfilled by naX2ceLL and analyses the different possibilities to protect the Intellectual Property. Regarding the Legal Study, no barriers have been identified since the access to solvers´ libraries, required during the use of naX2ceLL software, is allowed for clients with license of use of those solvers with no additional cost. With regards to IPR, it will be protected as much as possible, but software inventions are not always able to be patented.
After Feasibility study conducted throughout this document we can conclude that the results are promising, so IDAERO will continue with the naX2ceLL business idea and will look for source of financing through the SME INS Phase 2.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Currently, Engineers read and manage Solvers results with commercial Post-Processors and “handmade” solutions, manually and inefficiently copying data from text format or using Macros. This is an extended procedure since, to our best knowledge there is lack of similar software tools on the market that can read efficiently and robustly from Solvers binary files with independency of their size and transform and put automatically the results as useful functions in MS Excel cells. The naX2ceLL software developed by IDAERO is able to read Simulation Solvers results incredibly fast, as well as transform automatically binary data files according to the desired function.
Regarding the preparation of the reports, where the conclusions of the Simulation Process are described (final step in Simulation), current reports in Adobe pdf format contain fixed pictures showing graphically the different post-processed results and need an external post-processor to be opened. Although there are some library solutions that allow inserting 3D solid models in Adobe pdf format, they have no capabilities to manage 3D modelling simulation results inside the pdfs. However, naX2ceLL will be able to insert 3D reduced post-processed Simulation Models in the Adobe pdf reports, without needing to have and open an external postprocessor, being easily readable in any device, laptop, tablet, smartphone. These post-processors are expensive and could be not available when needed. NaX2ceLL reduces the time of preparing the reports and improves its quality by integrating 3D Post-Processed Models.
As mentioned above, benefits for users of naX2ceLL will be bringing products to market sooner, cheaper and safer, being this way more competitive and profitable.
Benefits for IDAERO will be high increases in turnover up to 6.4M€/year, and company organic growth with stable FTE creation of around 14 new direct FTEs.
Benefits for EU will be FTE creation, income because of technological developments, and improving worldwide position in development of FEA SW,
To face next stage of development, IDAERO will use own economic resources and also will look for external sources of finance like SME INST Phase 2.

Overall concept of nax2ceLL: from data to structure design

Capture image of nax2ceLL application embeded into an Excell file