Is SimSolid Accurate? We Dare You to Find Out!
It’s been slightly over a year since hundreds of our customers and friends converged in Paris, France at the 2018 Global ATC. The opening keynote by our chief executive officer and founder, Jim Scapa was particularly exciting as this was when he announced Altair’s acquisition of SimSolid.
The past 365+ days have proven to be nothing less than thrilling for both Altair as a company and SimSolid as a product. In addition to continued development and enhancements, we have seen SimSolid's user base expand into the thousands and the number of companies investigating the tool balloon into the tens of thousands.
We are increasingly receiving amazing feedback from new SimSolid users. It is not uncommon to hear things like, “With SimSolid, we now run our simulations in 1/10 of the time it used to take,” or “SimSolid allows us to simulate in five minutes what used to take over two hours.”
The positive feedback has been incredible and overwhelming. However, we are getting used to another reaction when introducing SimSolid. Our SimSolid sales and marketing pitch is often met with a hearty plate of skepticism. You see, to some, a mesh free simulation tool that is both incredibly fast and extremely accurate simply does not seem possible. We have even heard the claims described as “magical” or “sorcery.”
Trust me, if you had or are having these feelings of skepticism towards SimSolid, we get it. In fact, we don’t just “get it,” we had these exact thoughts ourselves.
That is precisely why (as noted by Altair CEO, Jim Scapa above), we put SimSolid thorough a gauntlet of tests, running and validating literally hundreds of simulations ranging from simple parts, to complex assemblies. Upon completion of this testing our skepticism turned to confidence that SimSolid is the “real-deal.”
One thing worth noting is that we are not the only ones to put SimSolid through its paces. Third party expert, Dr. Richard King, a Stanford PhD with 30 years of experience writing adaptive finite-element analysis software and co-founder of Rasna Corporation, also set out to test the accuracy of SimSolid’s results. These results are summarized in his “SimSolid ‘Real World’ Validation Manual for Stress Accuracy” document.
In total, Dr. King ran simulations on 18 different models in SimSolid and compared the static simulation studies with the same models simulated in SOLIDWORKS. Similar to our internal tests, his studies included both single part models, as well as assemblies. Dr. King concluded that SimSolid is not only incredibly accurate, but also extremely fast as noted in summary table and quote below.
“Solution time was similar for all the smaller models. The last 3 models are relatively large and the timing for SOLIDWORKS vs. SimSolid is described below. For these models the total solution time (including meshing time in SOLIDWORKS) is significantly less in SimSolid. For all models, considerably less user intervention was require in SimSolid to achieve an accurate result.”
You can download the full validation manual completely free and see the full summary of the results here. Below is an example of one the validations on a simple canoe paddle.
Even with this data, we encourage and challenge you to not just take our word for it. Embrace the skepticism, download the free trial of SimSolid and do exactly what we did, test it out on your own models. Compare your results to your traditional or CAD embedded FEA and see for yourself what the thousands of satisfied SimSolid users across the globe have already learned. SimSolid is real, the claims are true, and it can truly revolutionize the way you and your company design products.
The past 365+ days have proven to be nothing less than thrilling for both Altair as a company and SimSolid as a product. In addition to continued development and enhancements, we have seen SimSolid's user base expand into the thousands and the number of companies investigating the tool balloon into the tens of thousands.
We are increasingly receiving amazing feedback from new SimSolid users. It is not uncommon to hear things like, “With SimSolid, we now run our simulations in 1/10 of the time it used to take,” or “SimSolid allows us to simulate in five minutes what used to take over two hours.”
The positive feedback has been incredible and overwhelming. However, we are getting used to another reaction when introducing SimSolid. Our SimSolid sales and marketing pitch is often met with a hearty plate of skepticism. You see, to some, a mesh free simulation tool that is both incredibly fast and extremely accurate simply does not seem possible. We have even heard the claims described as “magical” or “sorcery.”
Trust me, if you had or are having these feelings of skepticism towards SimSolid, we get it. In fact, we don’t just “get it,” we had these exact thoughts ourselves.
That is precisely why (as noted by Altair CEO, Jim Scapa above), we put SimSolid thorough a gauntlet of tests, running and validating literally hundreds of simulations ranging from simple parts, to complex assemblies. Upon completion of this testing our skepticism turned to confidence that SimSolid is the “real-deal.”
One thing worth noting is that we are not the only ones to put SimSolid through its paces. Third party expert, Dr. Richard King, a Stanford PhD with 30 years of experience writing adaptive finite-element analysis software and co-founder of Rasna Corporation, also set out to test the accuracy of SimSolid’s results. These results are summarized in his “SimSolid ‘Real World’ Validation Manual for Stress Accuracy” document.
In total, Dr. King ran simulations on 18 different models in SimSolid and compared the static simulation studies with the same models simulated in SOLIDWORKS. Similar to our internal tests, his studies included both single part models, as well as assemblies. Dr. King concluded that SimSolid is not only incredibly accurate, but also extremely fast as noted in summary table and quote below.
“Solution time was similar for all the smaller models. The last 3 models are relatively large and the timing for SOLIDWORKS vs. SimSolid is described below. For these models the total solution time (including meshing time in SOLIDWORKS) is significantly less in SimSolid. For all models, considerably less user intervention was require in SimSolid to achieve an accurate result.”
You can download the full validation manual completely free and see the full summary of the results here. Below is an example of one the validations on a simple canoe paddle.
Even with this data, we encourage and challenge you to not just take our word for it. Embrace the skepticism, download the free trial of SimSolid and do exactly what we did, test it out on your own models. Compare your results to your traditional or CAD embedded FEA and see for yourself what the thousands of satisfied SimSolid users across the globe have already learned. SimSolid is real, the claims are true, and it can truly revolutionize the way you and your company design products.