Parasolid V24.0 released May 2011

Since our last newsletter we have released Parasolid V24.0, continuing our long established cycle of a major release in the spring and a point release in the autumn. V24.0 delivers a set of enhancements with an emphasis on adding advanced and intelligent techniques to avoid potential failures when performing long sequences of complex modeling operations. These sequences often arise from intuitively simple end-user commands in engineering workflows. A single command may give rise to hundreds of complex blending operations and local operations on difficult configurations that the end-user may not fully appreciate. Typical examples might include removing all blends from an engine block before CAE analysis or adjusting draft on a casting to optimize manufacturing.

End-user productivity increases dramatically when such sequences can be completed successfully, eliminating end-user cycles of skilful investigation, manual fixing of issues and re-trying the command. Application development is also greatly simplified and so is more productive with more robust outcomes.

However, these powerful capabilities can only be achieved by building on functionality that is broad, deep and robust in a way that no other component modeler can match.

Blending

Several enhancements have been made to increase the success of operations sequences:

• Blend Limits on Failure - When an operation on a sequence of blends is not possible, Parasolid calculates and returns information to the calling-application on how to terminate the successful sections cleanly so they may be applied.
• Re-Blend Operations - It is now possible to add and remove blend overflow in more complex configurations, typically when editing adjacent faces:

• New Blend Limit Type - The calling-application can now request that blends that might overlap those being created in the same operation stop short, thus giving the calling application an alternative solution:

• Conic Blends – The shape of conic blends can now be controlled precisely by specifying the central radius of curvature of conic cross-sections in both edge blending and face blending:

Local Operations

Numerous modeling enhancements have been made to improve the success and performance of operations sequences to support complex end-user workflows. These include:

• Filling Holes - More methods are provided for defining how to fill-in holes, giving the calling-application more sophisticated control leading to higher quality results:

• Offsetting and Hollowing - Automatic degeneracy repair is now incorporated into hollowing and offsetting operations.
• Local Operation Performance - Intelligent identification of entities that are unchanged by local modeling operation has been added to avoid the need to check and potentially heal those entities.

Application Support

V24.0 includes enhancements to help developers produce better applications more quickly:

• Thread-Safe Performance - thread-safe performance has been optimized further by allowing the calling application to group function calls into contiguous chains. Exclusivity checks are performed for each chain rather than for each function call, saving considerable overhead for multiple, lightweight calls:

• Spun Outline - This functionality has been extensively enhanced in terms of robustness and configuration coverage in response to challenging customer requirements: