FEA On the Cheap for Students

Many CAD vendors have already discovered that the best way to introduce users to their software is to give it away for free. IMSI did this with TurboCAD years ago. Lately, Alibre and UGS have joined the great giveaway. While our site FreeCAD.com lists several free FEA programs (see FEA programs), major CAE vendors have held firm with their (high) prices. But just this week, Dassault Systemes introduced a student version of Abaqus. Okay, it's not free ($99 + $20 for the manual) and it's only for students, but it seems to be a step in that direction.

Just to make sure you don't try using ABAQUS for commercial purposes, Dassault imposes these limits on the ABAQUS Student Edition 6.6:

• 1,000 node models
• no support for user-defined subroutines
• no distributed parallel processing

The 1,000 node limit seems to be on the small side, especially since meshers these days seem to be relying on small element size to increase the accuracy of the results. Other than that, this seems to be a pretty capable program.

Where where these guys when I was going through engineering school?

Simulation results in ABAQUS/Explicit show high-speed impact of a spherical dome by a rigid projectile. The dome is representative of a pressure vessel (gas tank, liquid container, etc.). The model considers large deformation effects, yielding and contact conditions.
(picture and caption provided by Dassault Systemes)

Find out more at http://www.abaqus.com/products/se_order.html