which fem?

i've heard of a... ehm... "custom" (?) version of cosmos for
solidworks. i believe it to be called cosmosworks, but i've never seen
it working, then i don't know how good it is. do any of you use it? is
it simple to use? i mean that the old versions --seen in eureka! or
microstation-- of cosmos required you to be an expert mechanical
engineer [1] to use it and wasn't very user friendly --the fem didn't
let you specify absolute coordinates for forces applied to the
part/assembly but you had to "build" small solid references on the
parts--. i believe it improved a lot its user interface and ease of
use, but would like to hear something from its users.

there's a company offering us design space, for something around
11.800 euros/year + 20% VAT. since it's a *big* sum, i'd like to know
if any of you think this is a very good package.
i still have to ask for cosmosworks price.

cheers,

[1] i know you need to know exactly how things works and need to have
some skills in mechanics to use fem, but older cosmos *really* needed
too much...

 

Gianni Rondinini wrote:
Have a look at DesignStar. You can find information at www.srac.com. It
integrates nicely with SW, has a SW like interface and doesn't have the
issues CosmosWorks has.

 

Are you running SW03 or SW04? If so, you can try out CosmosXpress, which is
a stripped down version of CosmosWorks.

We've been looking at FEA packages here and one of us spent quite a bit of
time recently trying out demo versions. His take on CosmosWorks was that it
was easy to use but doesn't have much capability, meaning that we would have
to go to CosmosM and/or DesignStar, which weren't as easy to use. He was
also unimpressed with the mesher and the technical help. Another downside is
that SW is tied up while it solves.

He preferred NE/Nastran to Cosmos, as it seemed more stable and had good
capability for a reasonable price. The mesher was better, but still had
trouble on some of our "swoopy" parts. Technical help wasn't very good
(although others in this group have commented on their good technical
service).

His favorite was Ansys, primarily due to its stability, the robust mesher,
and the excellent technical service. The Workbench interface is intuitive,
easy to use, and reads SW files, but you have to use the Classic interface
to do nonlinear materials, which is not so easy to use. It's more expensive
than the others for the same capability.

Jerry Steiger
Tripod Data Systems