ESI announces VA One 2012

23 Août 2012 Paris, France
Latest release of noise and vibration simulation software includes embedded Design Optimization and support for cloud computing

ESI Group, pioneer and world-leading solution provider in virtual prototyping for manufacturing industries, announces the release of VA One 2012. VA One is a complete solution for simulating noise and vibration across the full frequency range and seamlessly combines Finite Elements, Boundary Elements (BEM), and Statistical Energy Analysis (SEA) in a single model. This new release includes an easy-to-use Design Optimization module that is fully integrated within the VA One environment, along with significant enhancements to VA One’s Boundary Element solvers that deliver faster solution times.

Design Optimization Module

When designing for noise and vibration performance, it is often useful to be able to optimize automatically or balance various parameters of a design in order to meet certain performance goals. A common application is to ‘balance’ the interior sound package in transportation applications in order to reduce mass whilst also meeting various performance targets. VA One 2012 provides a fully integrated Design Optimization module within the VA One environment. Parameter Variations, Parameter Optimizations and Monte Carlo simulations can all be performed quickly and easily using the VA One Graphical User Interface. VA One’s intelligent data caching also ensures fast solve times when using Design Optimization.

“Optimizing interior sound package is important in order to meet vehicle cost, noise, weight, and fuel efficiency targets” said Fumihiko Kosaka, Noise and Vibration Engineer, Mitsubishi Motors Corporation (MMC), “VA One is a standard tool for MMC and helps us meet our targets”.

Faster BEM models

The recent emergence of online cloud computing resources has opened up new possibilities for solving large BEM Models from desktop machines. VA One 2012 includes inbuilt support for solving BEM models in parallel on multi-core desktop machines, remote Linux machines, departmental networks, clusters and clouds. VA One automotive and aerospace BEM models, that previously required overnight execution on standard clusters, have been solved in minutes using Cloud computing (using over 800 parallel cores, while incurring negligible hardware costs). A new flexible ‘surge’ licensing option is being piloted in VA One 2012 to support this functionality. The BEM solvers in VA One 2012 have also been enhanced with a new adaptive integration scheme for standard BEM which results in faster solutions times, and a new preconditioner and iterative solver for Fast Multipole BEM which results in significant convergence improvements.

Productivity enhancements for Statistical Energy Analysis models (SEA)

New functionality has also been added to VA One 2012 for quickly editing the attributes of multiple SEA subsystems. This reduces the time required to build and modify SEA models resulting in significant productivity gains.

“We are pleased to announce the release of VA One 2012” said Dr. Phil Shorter, Director of Vibro-Acoustic Product Operations at ESI Group. “This release ensures our customers have access to advanced noise and vibration methods to help guide design, without needing customized processes for optimization or for solving large BEM models.”