GCAS chooses CAD Exchanger to streamline the importing of STEP geometry and creating the Computational Mesh

GCAS Incorporated is a cutting-edge technology services and products company with more than 25 years of service and experience in US national defense missions support. GCAS has developed a Simulation and Modeling tool (ACES) for predicting vehicle deterioration as a function of time due to corrosion.

Scott Woodson

ACES Developer, GCAS

“GCAS chooses CAD Exchanger to streamline the importing of STEP geometry and creating the Computational Mesh.”

Challenge

A bottleneck in the ACES Java software architecture was the reliance on the older C++ 3rd party software to: 1) import the 3D geometry of the vehicle including the assembly details from ISO STEP format, and 2) create the detailed finite element mesh needed for analysis.

Solution

CAD Exchanger imported the STEP files directly into X3D (the successor of VRML) format thereby eliminating several conversion steps needed with the old code. The formal Finite Element mesh was also eliminated and replaced with X3D CAD Exchanger computational mesh.

Value

The new ACES architecture utilizing CAD Exchanger SDK provided a significant improvement in the memory utilization and speed performance. Once the 3D geometry is imported into ACES in X3D format, the manipulation and display of the geometry goes much faster.