Pro/Mechanica

[anagnost]

Hello all,

I would like to have your opinions on Pro/Mechanica. How satisfied are
you in terms of:

* user friendliness
* speed
* quality of the results
* overall

We are a company that has two main sectors. The first produces storage
equipment, like steel shelving for warehouses, super markets etc. The
second produces waste management equipment, from steel waste containers
to waste compactors, bin lifting mechanisms etc. The material is mainly
steel, in sheetmetal form, round and rectangular tubes, plates etc. We
have bolted joints, weldments and pin joints in mechanisms.

At this period we are thinking to buy a CAE package and we have started
a market survey. Of course, Pro/Mechanica is one of the candidates
since we have three licenses of ProE and one license of ProMfg.

Do you have any suggestions for us?

Are there any of you that have experience on other packages like ANSYS?
How do they compare to Pro/Mechanica?

Thank you very much in advance.

Vassilis Anagnostopoulos*
*
SPIDER SA
Industrial Area - Rodotopi
45500 - Ioannina
Greece

[Chris3]

Starting with WF4 there is Mechanica Lite as part of the foundation
package. Why don't you have your users try that out as part of a trial
run?

Chris

[randyspeed]

Christopher,

Hands down. MECHANICA is the right choice. In all the categories you mention. You will not regret it. We specialize in MECHANICA consulting in the States, and since you are in Europe, I would be happy to recommend some good MECHANICA consultants on your side of the world.

Randy Speed
President & CEO
Speed Consulting, LLC
2871 Howard Road
Waxahachie, TX 75165
(972) 938-0490 office
(972) 937-2319 fax
www.speedconsulting.com

[randyspeed]

Vassilis,

Hands down. MECHANICA is the right choice. In all the categories you mention. You will not regret it. We specialize in MECHANICA consulting in the States, and since you are in Europe, I would be happy to recommend some good MECHANICA consultants on your side of the world.

Randy Speed
President & CEO
Speed Consulting, LLC
2871 Howard Road
Waxahachie, TX 75165
(972) 938-0490 office
(972) 937-2319 fax
www.speedconsulting.com

oops.

[ChrisKaswer]

Chris makes a good suggestion, although I'm not sure how limited the
"lite" package is - there may be features that you will need that will
not be included, so it may not be a fair comparison. As a long-time
user of ANSYS as well, I find Mechanica a better package for many of the
jobs we need to run. Where Mechanica falls short is in multiple load
steps and finite friction. The load step issue can be a fairly big one,
especially now that material plasticity is in WF5. Friction is not an
issue too often unless the load required for press-in or press-out
operations is needed as a result. ANSYS does a nice job with bolt
preload as they allow the user to "hold" the bolt for subsequent load
steps so the true initial preload (which is really a "pre-stretch")is
maintained. Simply applying a constant load as a bolt preload is not
sufficient since the real-world load in the bolt will change when
application loads are added - this is where load stepping is a big
advantage in ANSYS so you can observe preloaded conditions and compare
them to the addition of the working load ... and all while using
contacting bodies.

Your steel shelving applications should be handled well by Mechanica.
Your heavier steel waste containers might require ANSYS for certain,
more unusual applications - try these in Mechanica first to see if it
will handle your requirements. The attention to detail and training
required to use ANSYS is more demanding than for Mechanica.

For multi-body dynamics, the mechanisms package in Pro/E (MDX & MDO)
works very well and should handle all your multi-body kinematic and
dynamic needs.

Chris
Christopher Kaswer, M.Sc.
Principal Engineer
Jacobs Vehicle Systems
22 East Dudley Town Rd
Bloomfield, CT 06002-1002
USA
Chris.Kaswer@JakeBrake.com <">mailto:Chris.Kaswer@JakeBrake.com>

[PAULKORENKIEWIC]

Lite is VERY restrictive... attached is a brief spiel on it that I
picked up, somewhere along the way... I would also advise doing a
search on this exploder as when it came out there were quite a few
"discussions" of it's limitations and some fairly heated debate as to
just what PTC was trying to "accomplish" with it... (shades of
Pro/Manikin...)

Thanks...

Paul Korenkiewicz
FEV, Inc.
4554 Glenmeade
Auburn Hills, MI., 48326

[jholst-2]

I've been in the FEA simulation business for over 30 year and I've used many
different public and commercial FEA tools including MECHANICA, CFDesign,
ANSYS, NASTRAN, COSMOS, I-Deas, Algor and many others. Currently I consult
exclusively with design engineers helping to integrate FEA into the design
process. Most of the engineers I work with have very little FEA experience.
MECHANICA (for structural) and CFDesign (for flow and thermal) are the only
tools that I would recommend as 'design engineer' tools no matter which CAD
tool they use. Not because of the obvious 'ease of use' but because these
tools will help keep you out of trouble with feedback on the quality of the
solution. They also make it much faster to perform design iterations
without having to recreate the model each time. There are some types of
non-linear simulations that are limited in the current versions of these
tools but most of these capabilities would be not be appropriate for the
casual user trying to work with the other tools.



My recommendation would be to use the full version of Advanced MECHANICA
(some of the things you want to do are not available in the limited
versions), get training and start off with small simple parts and assembly
models to gain experience before jumping into larger models. As Randy Speed
suggests, you may want to seek out a local 'mentor' to help you get started.



---Jim Holst

[ChrisKaswer]

One brief follow-up for everybody from my note below: The plan for WF6
is to include load stepping. Additionally, the goal is for this
capability to be available for non-linear effects including contact,
large deflection and material plasticity. This would then give us a
significant improvement and open the door to solving sequenced loading
problems. As we approach the release date for WF6 sometime next year,
we'll learn more about the details of what will make the cut.

Cheers,

Chris

[ptc-676952]

Crist

Do you know if in WF6 mecanical version large- strain plastic deformation will be included?, Images a cylinder structure under axial collapsing under a buckling load, so during buckling there is contact (with friction) between the collapsed sections.

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