If you’re an engineer still using a local, on-premise CAE solution, you’re probably used to hitting limitations. Whether those limitations are related to hardware, physics, or simply time, each can be detrimental to obtaining valuable results.
With this mindset, simulation is deemed a “nice to have” for most organizations, and when used, it’s primarily to validate experimental results from costly physical prototyping (or to produce colorful charts to show management). The status quo that tells us “real engineers” must create physical prototypes: they design, build, test, break, analyze, and redesign physical prototypes until they converge on a viable design that meets engineering targets like cost, performance, and durability, but this old way of thinking is no longer sustainable in most industries.
Cloud Simulation & Digital Prototyping
Now, engineers stand at the dawn of a paradigm shift, as cloud engineering systems open up advanced multiphysics solvers with “infinite” cloud computing resources, accessed through easy-to-use, integrated CAD/CAE workflows. This new simulation power enables true digital prototyping from a web browser.
Cloud engineering simulation and digital prototyping allow engineers to quickly find optimal designs, understand the sensitivity of design performance for manufacturing processes and tolerances, stress-test designs over environmental conditions (e.g. thermal, shock, fatigue, etc.), and accurately predict ultimate manufacturing cost, yield, and viability of novel designs. All of this is delivered before a single physical prototype is made.
Ultimately, this new approach offsets the majority of risk, cost, and time of both on-premise CAE, and physical prototyping – saving a great deal of R&D budget that is wasted globally each year.
Digital Prototyping with OnScale Solve & Onshape
OnScale Solve is the cloud-native CAE platform built by engineers for engineers. It is a multiphysics solver with mechanical, structural, thermal, and computational fluid dynamics capabilities.
OnScale has partnered with Onshape — integrating cloud CAD with cloud simulation — enabling engineers to push the boundaries of innovation and bring us the world-changing technologies we have been waiting for.
As a result of this bond, OnScale is offering 500 core-hours to every Onshape Professional and Enterprise user. Watch the video below for more information on this promo.
What is a “core hour”? Are there limitations?
A core hour is a measure of computational workload. In other words, if your simulation takes one hour on a one main machine, then that’s one core hour. There are no limitations to features OnScale offers — all simulation functionalities can be used.
Learn about this and more in the Basics about Core Hours section of the OnScale Solve Simulation Fundamentals course in the Onshape Learning Center.
After using 500 core hours, OnScale Solve offers a pay-as-you-simulate plan as well as several pricing options.
What Is OnScale Solve?
We built OnScale to overcome limitations imposed by legacy desktop simulation tools. We focused on the things engineers need most to overcome next-generation product design challenges and compress development time:
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Fast multiphysics simulation
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Automatic CAD repair and meshing
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Scalable cloud HPC compute capacity
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Intuitive UI/UX and integrated workflows; and
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Insightful results augmented by Jupyter notebooks
Find out more about OnScale Solve and learn to use it by watching Simulation Tutorials, heading to the Onshape Learning Center for Simulation Fundamentals or contacting one of OnScale’s application engineers, who are ready to solve problems and answer questions.
Try OnScale Solve today. Run your simulations with your free private account loaded with 500 core-hours/year of simulation power.
Ian Campbell is the founder and CEO of OnScale, a Cloud Engineering Simulation platform backed by Intel Capital and Google's Gradient Ventures.
This blog was originally published November 10, 2020 and updated September 15, 2021.