Dassault Systèmes Announces ABAQUS® Version 6.6 for Advanced Finite Element Analysis

Paris, France, April 12, 2006 – Dassault Systèmes (DS) (Nasdaq: DASTY; Euronext Paris: #13065, DSY.PA), a world leader in 3D and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solutions, announces the availability of Version 6.6 of ABAQUS®, its advanced finite element analysis software suite within the SIMULIA product portfolio. The company’s highly regarded analysis products, ABAQUS/Standard and ABAQUS/Explicit, offer new capabilities in vibration analysis, material failure characterization, tire modeling, and computing performance. Sophisticated new tools in ABAQUS/CAE, the premier model building and results visualization environment for ABAQUS analysis, help ABAQUS users accelerate the process of getting more accurate results and producing more compelling presentations.

With this significant new software release, Dassault Systèmes extends its leadership in providing a more unified FEA environment that is open to leveraging models and data from a variety of CAD and CAE software tools. The ABAQUS Version 6.6 suite is a powerful and robust simulation platform that enables manufacturing companies in every industry to develop innovative and reliable products faster and more cost effectively.

“ABAQUS Version 6.6 offers many new and exciting features that we expect to significantly enhance our capability to accurately and efficiently simulate complex tire structures,” says David M. Dryden, Manager, Research & Technology at Cooper Tire & Rubber Company. “We are especially looking forward to the ability to apply an extension of steady state transport theory to periodic treaded tire structures. This technology provides a highly efficient method to incorporate detailed tread geometries onto complex tire structures for analysis of tire/road interactions and offers the potential to advance the approximation of treaded tire structures in steady state rolling."

“A thorough understanding of customer challenges is always the starting point for improving ABAQUS software,” says Ken Short, vice president of strategy and marketing for ABAQUS, Inc. “ABAQUS Version 6.6 contains many technical innovations to help customers achieve more realistic simulation of product behavior. With enhanced usability features in ABAQUS/CAE and open-systems links to the major CAD and CAE packages, ABAQUS Version 6.6 provides a scalable environment for simulation and accelerates the process of achieving high-fidelity analysis results with less effort.”

Important features of ABAQUS Version 6.6 include:

• Automatic multi-level substructuring (AMS).  ABAQUS/AMS, a new, fully integrated add-on capability for vibration analysis in ABAQUS/Standard, efficiently extracts hundreds or thousands of natural frequencies in very large linear systems. Benchmarks indicate problems can run from 10 to 25 times faster using AMS compared to alternative methods. This advance is of great benefit to customers in the automotive powertrain, aerospace, nuclear, and defense industries, particularly those who are currently using multiple software tools for dynamic simulation.
• Material failure characterization. ABAQUS Version 6.6 builds on existing ABAQUS tools for fracture and failure analysis by introducing a new laminate damage and failure model for layered composites. This capability enables aerospace manufacturers, and other organizations that are increasing their use of composite materials, to simulate delamination and ply failure simultaneously.
• Bolted-joint simulation with threads. ABAQUS set a new standard a decade ago with technology for simulating the clamping effect of bolted joints in multi-component assemblies. ABAQUS Version 6.6 sets another benchmark for realistic bolted-joint simulation by providing the first commercially available solution that enables analysts to accurately represent the effects of bolt threads without creating detailed thread models. This unique technology is especially important for applications in the automotive and heavy manufacturing industries.
• Tire modeling. ABAQUS Version 6.6 allows analysts in the tire industry to include the effects of detailed tire tread with road interaction in simulations of rolling tires. This feature of the software, along with enhancements related to acoustic simulation of the inflated tire system, is unmatched in its ability to accurately model complex tire structures and to simulate how a tread design performs under various acceleration, braking, and cornering maneuvers.
• Adaptive remeshing. This first ABAQUS release of an integrated adaptive remeshing capability represents a major usability improvement. Analysts can now improve the quality of their ABAQUS/Standard results by utilizing a close and automated interaction with ABAQUS/CAE to arrive iteratively at a mesh that improves solution accuracy, a benefit for any industry application.
• Postprocessing enhancements for nonlinear analysis. Many new enhancements establish ABAQUS/CAE as the preferred product for pre- and postprocessing of ABAQUS simulation results. Special features synchronize animations with external videos, animate X-Y plots alongside other animations, and utilize plot states to combine multiple plot types and options in a single viewport display.
• Parallel performance improvements. In ABAQUS/Explicit, 16 to 32 processors can now be used effectively for certain classes of large models to reduce turnaround time and to increase throughput. In ABAQUS/Standard, a new distributed memory parallel sparse solver is introduced, providing good scaling for many problems on up to 8 processors. Large classes of simulations in both ABAQUS/Standard and ABAQUS/Explicit can now be run on distributed memory cluster configurations.

With more than 115 major improvements, ABAQUS Version 6.6 achieves a new overall standard for performance, usability, and simulation fidelity, while upholding a distinguished reputation for flexibility and reliability.