Creating a solid product design can take months, sometimes even years. It requires building and testing multiple, expensive prototypes until reaching a final design that meets all the requirements. For SMEs this often means a very high initial cost and time investment required for entering the market.

Luckily, the number of prototypes and the overall design cycle can be significantly reduced with the computer-aided engineering (CAE) technology, which allows you to virtually test and optimize your designs before building the actual physical prototype.

In the past, this type of technology was not very accessible for SMEs, due to the pricing of traditional, on-premises CAE software which can easily climb from thirty to fifty thousand dollars. Everything has changed, however, when in 2012, the five founders of SimScale came together to disrupt the virtual prototyping market and built an affordable and intuitive engineering simulation solution — the world’s first 100% cloud-based CAE platform. Today, SimScale became an integral part of the design validation process for thousands of successful companies worldwide and over 80,000 individual users.

Source: SimScale

SimScale allows engineering professionals to test, validate, and optimize CAD designs using a standard web browser. The platform offers an easy-to-use interface with a workflow-based approach for performing various analysis types, especially Finite Element Analysis (FEA), Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and Thermal Simulation making it applicable across multiple industries such as automotive, consumer goods, energy, HVAC, aerospace, manufacturing, hardware, architecture and more.

By harnessing the power of cloud computing, SimScale eliminates the hurdles that have been accompanying traditional CAE software for decades: high installation costs, licensing fees, deployment of high-performance computing hardware, required updates and maintenance. At the same time, SimScale also grants access to over 10,000 high quality, publicly available simulation projects, which can be used for free as templates when working on an individual simulation setup, allowing designers and engineers to get reliable analysis results faster without the need of being a simulation expert. All this, combined with the subscription-based payment model (only 170 EUR/month), makes SimScale a very attractive and a game-changing solution for small and medium businesses, interested in using virtual prototyping for their standard design process.

SimScale is integrated with several open source codes, including OpenFOAM, Code_Aster and CalculiX and its talented team of engineers is constantly developing the platform, adding new features for different simulation types.

Source: SimScale

Cloud computing is no stranger to CAD either, as US-based company Onshape is developing a cloud-based computer-aided design (CAD) software that empowers users to design their own models using a simple laptop or tablet. Through the Connector App, they can transfer the CAD files from Onshape to SimScale, being able to design, mesh and simulate their products 100% in the web browser, at a fraction of the cost of traditional solutions.

A SimScale add-in for Autodesk Fusion 360 has also been released in August last year, to allow direct import of CAD models to SimScale.

SMEs that want to try SimScale can register online at www.simscale.com for a 14-day free trial of the Professional plan that will grant them access to all simulation features of the platform with 200 core hours that they can use towards private projects. Moreover, if the company is not older than 3 years and has less than 50 employees, becomes eligible for a SimScale for Startups program package which includes: 10% off for Professional Plan, free CAE Professional Training, and 3.000 core hours for private projects.