Tech Soft 3D Launches CEETRON Toolkits to Support Complete CAE Workflow

Tech Soft 3D, the leading provider of engineering software development toolkits , today announces a new line of toolkits designed to fully support computer aided engineering (CAE) workflows.  Comprising four components, the CEETRON suite of solutions enables software engineers to accelerate CAE application development at every stage of the process. The new toolkits bring together technology from Ceetron AS, Visual Kinematics (VKI) and Tech Soft 3D to provide the industry’s first complete platform for pre-processing, solving, and post-processing of CAE data, giving customers such as ANSYS, Elise GmBH, DNV, SimScale and nTopology one strategic partner to work with for their CAE applications.

“Bringing together the technologies acquired in 2020  to create a complete suite of CAE toolkits that connects with HOOPS and Polygonica is not only very exciting for us, but is also in line with our mission to empower our customers to create the most sophisticated applications and products using powerful, integrated and easy- to- use component technologies,” said Ron Fritz, CEO of Tech Soft 3D. “It has been especially rewarding to see the results of our successful acquisitions, not only from a product standpoint, but also to see our teams so well integrated and working towards the same goal.  This is a milestone for our company, and we anticipate that our customers will be very happy with these new tools and the ability to relate to a single partner for all their CAE technology needs.”

CAE Workflows are Unique

Throughout a typical CAE workflow, each step requires specific technologies, where the use of market-hardened toolkits is highly beneficial. When looking at the setup stage, HOOPS Exchange is the market’s best-in-class data access component, capable of bringing into play geometry from 30+ CAD formats. In many cases, the design needs healing prior to meshing: Polygonica is the ideal component to prepare tessellations for CAE. The CEETRON toolkit line takes the relay at that point, with CEETRON Mesh yielding both 2D and 3D meshes adapted to simulation purposes. When it comes to the calculations themselves, the CEETRON Solve SDK is an extensive framework to formulate finite element equations, assemble them into a global system, and eventually solve them through high-performance parallel (SMP) linear algebra.

The workflow ends with the analysis and sharing of the solver’s results analyzed by the expert eye of an engineer. With CEETRON Envision, Tech Soft 3D provides a palette of technologies to handle data extraction, display model generation, optimized rendering on desktop and native web, as well as data sharing and reporting.

Finally, the CAE workflow is also supported by general purpose  technologies such as visualization, interoperability and automation. The new CEETRON Toolkits provide off-the-shelf solutions for each of these to help CAE developers reduce their development and workflow building efforts.

Few SDKs are as friendly as the CEETRON Toolkits and provide such a high level of development efficiency. With the same lines of code, developers can achieve reading capability of 30+ industry standard CAE formats and are able to write out 10+ formats to convey results to other packages. Last but not least, the toolkits are developed and supported by a highly responsive team of experienced developers.

“TRANSVALOR has a successful 25 year-lon relationship with Ceetron, and this strategic partnership contributes efficiently to the solutions that TRANSVALOR develops for its customers,” said Stephane Heitz, CEO at TRANSVALOR.  “It has been a key element in our historic leadership in material forming simulation software worldwide. We are looking forward to exploring the new possibilities now that Ceetron is a Tech Soft 3D company, and that the component offering covers the full simulation and analysis workflow.  “

Ceetron Envision

Ceetron Envision is the industry’s first all-in-one CAE analysis and visualization platform that provides a complete framework specialized in CAE data analysis and visualization.  It includes data processing, rendering, automation and sharing, and is available for both browser-based web applications  and more classical desktop ones.  Envision allows developers to seamlessly dig into the large CAE datasets produced by solvers and provide interactive and automated analysis tools for expert engineering.  Mechanical engineers can also share their analysis work through a wide variety of visualization outputs: HTML files, AR/VR headsets, Microsoft documents, interactive PPTs, etc. .

Key features of Ceetron Envision include:

• High-speed extraction tools
• CPU and memory-optimized CAE data management
• Cutting planes, isosurfaces, isovolumes, particle traces
• Animations
• Length and history plots
• Powerful and easy-to-develop APIs
• Shader-based OpenGL and WebGL
• Desktop and in-browser apps
• Universal display model sharing format
• Lightweight storage of key interactive models with results
• Enhanced engineering efficiency
• Embeddable interactive models for websites, Word, PPT, HTML

The new CEETRON Toolkits provide off-the-shelf solutions for every CAE workflow to help developers reduce their development and workflow building efforts.

Ceetron Access

Ceetron Access provides the interoperability necessary to open closed simulation applications to the global CAE ecosystem.  Through a unified access to nearly all CAE files formats, Ceetron Access is a key building block for CAE interconnections and therefore, workflows. Unlike other SDKs, Ceetron Access does not try to force data into a particular paradigm, it simply reads data from the native file and stores it in memory in a universal model that can be interrogated.

Key features of Ceetron Access include:

• Import of 30+ of the most popular CAE formats: Ansys, Abaqus, Nastran, Hypermesh, Fluent, openFoam, etc.
• Export to 10+ standard CAE formats
• High performance with efficient memory usage

Ceetron Mesh

Ceetron Mesh works on conforming tessellations to deliver fail-free automatic mesh generations. It provides meshes in 2D and 3D with control on mesh size, geometric precision and element quality. The surface mesher generates triangles and quads, and the volume mesher provides tetrahedrons and mixed pyramid/hex meshes. Furthermore, both parabolic and cubic elements can be generated.  The Ceetron Mesh SDK provides a complete set of control options for mesh size – both isotropic and anisotropic –  as well as for element quality. Finally, the toolkit is delivered with source code to illustrate how it can be interfaced to popular geometry kernels such as Siemens Parasolid, Spatial ACIS and OpenCASCADE. Along the same lines, a bridge to HOOPS Exchange further expands the range of CAD input formats.

Key features of Ceetron Mesh include:

• Broad element support
• Extensive set of control options
• CAD integrations with Parasolid, ACIS, OpenCASCADE and all formats supported by HOOPS Exchange

Ceetron Solve

Ceetron Solve is a high-performance platform for building finite element method (FEM) solvers. Its components allow defining element-level contributions, and handle global assembly as well as linear solving. It allows developers to model at element level and obtain FEM contributions of a given element and includes a built-in library of material models. In addition, the toolkit tackles the assembly of the local matrix and vector contributions, as well as the pure math needed for linear system and eigenvalue problem solving. The toolkits are built on a high level of coarse-grained data distribution on shared-memory parallel architectures, and the algorithms are continuously benchmarked on real-life simulations and optimized for memory and CPU to remain ahead of the competition.

Key features of Ceetron Solve include:

• Local physics: Define physical models at element level and obtain FEM contributions of the element
• Global solving: Equation system assembly, linear equation solving and eigenvalue problem resolution
• High level of coarse-grained SMP, including efficient out-of-core solving, best-in-class iterative and direct solvers and a high-speed AMLS eigensolver

The Ceetron Toolkits provide an unmatched ability to fetch and process data to provide insight to engineers – the key of a successful CAE analysis environment. Tech Soft 3D’s tools are known for their performance, both in terms of execution, speed and low memory consumption, and the Ceetron Toolkits maintain the power and flexibility required for CAE workflows.

“Our teams have spent the past 25+ years developing and proving these toolkits to align with the needs of our customers and the market,” added Fritz.  “We are proud to be able to offer our customers rock-solid and high-performing solutions to enable rapid, robust development of CAE applications and workflows.”

The Ceetron Toolkits are the culmination of technologies from Ceetron and VKI, which Tech Soft 3D acquired in 2020.

About Ceetron Toolkits

Ceetron SDKs are the industry’s first complete platform for pre-processing, solving, and post-processing of CAE data, enabling software engineers to accelerate CAE application development at every stage of the process.  Ceetron SDKs are used by top-tier CAE simulation developers such as Autodesk, ANSYS, Dassault Systèmes, HBM Prenscia, Simscale, DNV GL and Transvalor.

HOOPS is a registered trademark of Tech Soft 3D. All other products or company references are the property of their respective holders.

About Tech Soft 3D

Tech Soft 3D is the leading provider of engineering software development toolkits. Established in 1996 and headquartered in Bend, Oregon, Tech Soft 3D also has offices in California, France, England, Japan and Norway. The company’s toolkit products power more than 500 unique applications running on hundreds of millions of computers worldwide. Tech Soft 3D is backed by investment firm Battery Ventures. For more information, visit www.techsoft3d.com.