If anyone has experience using ALGOR, expecially with "INCAD Plus" and MES, I would appreciate hearing your comments, good or bad. - Thanks, LS
I am not the user, but a fellow designer is. ALGOR is the most user difficult FEA program out there. That is, in my humble opinion and several others I've talked to. The INCAD Plus does seem to have a seemless transition from our solid model geometry (SolidWorks 2000) into ALGOR. But, from there Algor takes over and has no associativity to the original model. Design change in the CAD package means starting all over with the ALGOR model.
If you are looking for something that integrates into your CAD package, research what partners (of the CAD vendor) have an associative FEA analysis. For example, we are currently in the process of demo-ing COSMOS/Works for SolidWorks. It is associative to geometry changes and is much more user friendly for analysis. For complex analysis it migrates into it's native format, as the demo goes. We'll see how well it does for us in the next few weeks.
Another program is MSC's Visual Nastran, which seems to integrate into a slew of different CAD packages. Several others FEA programs exist that are too numerous to name here.
I hate to sound like an ALGOR basher, but I honestly don't have anything good to say about them.
As a further recommendation, have several vendors come in to show you a demo, but not their own. Have your own part ready and tell them that you want to see their software work on your part, not some canned marketing demo that shows pretty graphics but no number crunching. (Speaking of which, your demo part should be small so you are not spending all the demo time waiting for the computer to run its analysis.)
Hope this helps. I can talk with our FEA analyst more specifically if you like.
--Scott Wertel
Interface, Inc.
scottw@interfaceforce.com
