Company Background
Ceetron AS is a privately held, limited liability company founded in 1995 as a spin-off from SINTEF Applied Mathematics, providing advanced 3D Engineering Visualization Software. Initially, the name of the company was Viewtech AS, but in 2000 Viewtech and Dynamic Imaging merged under the Ceetron name.
CEETRON Products and Services
Ceetron AS offers advanced 3D visualization products for Finite Element Analysis (FEA) and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) to customers doing engineering within virtually any industry (including energy, marine, aerospace, and automotive). The product portfolio comprises software developer tools, desktop applications, and services.
Engineering Visualization
Ceetron's main business has always been visualization of numerical data in a Computer Aided Design (CAE) setting. In the 15 plus years Ceetron has been providing visualization of data from engineering simulations, numerical simulation has become an increasingly important factor in the engineering design process. And the trend continues: Enhanced capabilities, faster algorithms, faster processing speed, more CPU memory, and increasing storage space provide for more advanced tools to the engineering community. With this development, the Finite Element and the CFD models have dramatically increased in size and complexity thanks to the better hardware and better software for model generation, solution, and post-processing. Ceetron has been - and is – watching these trends closely to provide the right tools for the engineering community.
Visualization as a Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) tool
Visualization of numerical data has matured into a key engineering tool, this is particularly true for the study of dynamic processes like vehicle crash simulations or CFD. Also, visualization is very essential to collaborative engineering and reporting. In collaborative engineering, it is common that a group of engineers discuss the results shown at a terminal either directly or via connected terminals. However, an engineer may want to study the results from a simulation for himself and at his desk; this is not always practicable due to physical distance from the simulation hardware and/or lack of software licenses. This may be very inconvenient for a customer who does not have a license for the software utilized for the simulation. Here, GLview Inova may help: With Ceetron's free viewer and plug-ins, the engineers can view simulation data at their laptop, doing full 3D animations, drawing curves, and otherwise visualize the data. Further, the engineer can include 3D dynamic animations into his MS PowerPoint presentations, or even publish them on the company's web-site.
Also, Ceetron can offer solutions to companies having their own, in-house, software. Ceetron has provided Finite Element visualization to software companies like Blue Ridge Numerics Inc. and Transvalor as well as specialized purpose visualization for one of a kind systems, e.g. Pipe-laying software (customer Norsk Hydro).
Interpretation of Results
There are two main aspects regarding the correct interpretation of the results from structural and thermal analysis and Computational Fluid Dynamics: QA/QC and Insight. The former relates to provide results that represent the physics of the problem correctly, the latter to the correct understanding of the simulation data with respect to the physics as well as with respect to the engineering aspects of the subject studied.
Quality Control (QC)
QC in Finite Element Analysis and CFD is a very large topic, too large to be addressed here. Here, we will briefly address visualization of numerical data from FEA and CFD. The size of today's result databases from numerical simulations is often many Gigabytes, and hence there is much information to handle and understand. Only visualization makes it possible to grasp the total picture, the same holds for picking the hot-spots and studying details of the FE or CFD models.
At this point is must be emphasized that visualization can be indispensable even for (very) small models. Modal analysis can be utilized as a very nice example to show the importance of visualization in structural analysis. Let us assume that you want to do a parametric study of a structure, and you have a beam model of some 30 beam elements. You want to perform a modal transient analysis, and first you do a modal analysis. Before you proceed, you will have to check the modes. Here is an animation of the modes of interest indispensable, you would want to display and subsequently animate the modes one by one to check the mode shapes. And you would of course animate the outcome of the transient analysis by visualization to check that the results are reasonable. Visualization should be an integral part of the QC measures incorporated in your QA/QC activities.
Insight
The purpose of a numerical simulation is to provide insight and understanding. When it is clear that there are no errors invalidating the results, one will try to understand the behavior of the structure under the boundary conditions applied. And “understand” in this context refers to understanding the physics and behavior of the structure as well as the function and features in an engineering sense.
It is the responsibility of the analyst not only to provide correct results, but also to comment on functions and features of the subject simulated with respect to its intended functioning. To be able to do this, the analyst must have gained the proper insight in a quantitative (“the maximum displacement is ...”) as well in a qualitative sense (“at the end of the duct, we see a small wake, that ...”) . To gain the qualitative insight, visualization is of paramount importance.
Reporting
When the analyst has verified his results and appreciated the subject based on results and findings, he has to communicate these to the proper audience (e.g. colleagues, management, customers). This usually is done in the form of a written report ( i.e. the report is the product the analyst is delivering).
The time required to write a report is often (grossly) underestimated; reporting can be a most cumbersome task. The time to write a report is of course depending on the intended audience and the standard it must follow. Typically, reporting may take anything between 20 and 70 percent of the man-hours require for a Finite Element or CFD analysis project.
A requirement to a report is that it should be clear, comprehensive, and easy to read. Writing a quality report is not easy, especially when the report is a “one of a kind” one. If, however, a similar report that has been written before is available and can serve as a template, the time for the reporting can be significantly reduced. And even more gains can be expected when the report is a “standard report” following a fixed scheme.
Another difficulty is often to find the right set of figures to place in the report and the right set of animations to enclose with the report. Usually, the analyst will have to spend much time on visualizing results from the simulations, comprising verification, parameter studies, and issuing the final report. And, it is not uncommon, that the analyst forgets to save the plot or the animation on which his conclusions were based, only to having to figure out what he did and how he did it when writing the report.
Ceetrons' Products for Visualization and Reporting
The issues mentioned above under “Interpretation of Results” and “Reporting” from Finite Element and CFD Analysis are addressed by Ceetron's software. For the end user, GLview Inova covers the analysts' need for result visualization and GLview Report Builder greatly eases report writing. For in-house software, the GLview 3D Visualization API offers an opportunity to draw on Ceetron's technology. And GLview Express and the GLview 3D Plugin may be utilized with all other Ceetron software to provide distributed visualization solutions to the engineering community.
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