Every once and a while, it’s nice to take a break from the office, and find out what is new in the CAE world. I got a chance to attend the 2013 NX CAE Symposium held at the University of Cincinnati in Cincinnati, Ohio on November 5^th and 6^th. The symposium included two full days of information, with a dinner held at the Cincinnati Museum Center.  We had a nice tour of the Museum, which is at Union Terminal, the old Cincinnati main train station.  Along the tour there were various stations serving a variety of excellent food.  Since the dinner was held after hours when the facility was closed to the public, we got to spend some time looking at the historic exhibits showing the history of Cincinnati.  After dinner we got to view the IMAX Hubble 3D movie, which was followed by a dessert and coffee buffet.

During the presentations, we got to hear about the NX CAE/LMS roadmap, including information on how the LMS test suite of software will be integrated into the NX CAE environment.  Maya showed off the new parallel processing improvements for the NX Heat Transfer and NX Flow solvers which can give some significant performance improvements. There were several customer presentations, including one from Saratech’s Andrew Jabola and Shannon Gott from UC Riverside on “Finite Element Analysis of a Planar Titanium Cardiovascular Stent” which used the NX Advanced nonlinear option in NX NASTRAN to fully expand and then compress the stent.  The analysis was then correlated to test data.

User group meetings like this are a great way to meet colleagues from other companies to discuss trends in the CAE world and to find out how others are using the software to improve productivity.  It also gives you the opportunity to meet with  Siemens employees to ask specific questions on  software, and find out more about the software roadmaps.