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PHX ModelCenter
Desktop Trade Studies
ModelCenter® 10.0 by Phoenix Integration is a graphical environment for automation, integration, and design optimization that supports your entire product development team. It allows you to lower cost and reduce product development time. With PHX ModelCenter, you can quickly create an engineering process and then explore the design space to find the best design. PHX ModelCenter is adaptable, and works well with groups whose design processes change frequently.
The engineering process is inherently about making design decisions and tradeoffs between competing objectives. There are often too many choices and too little time to evaluate them all. Computer simulation has helped the process by allowing engineers and analysts to create “virtual” prototypes. Even with simulation, however, design is largely an intuition based guessing game to find good designs. Furthermore, design decisions increasingly have cross-discipline impacts that are not understood by any one expert thus limiting the effectiveness of commonly used experience based approaches. > Release Features
Benefits
Better Designs
PHX ModelCenter gives you powerful tools to inspect designs and find weaknesses. Correcting these weaknesses early in the design process can save corporations millions. Trade studies within PHX ModelCenter help you and your team find optimal solutions with lower weight, higher performance, and more robustness in the design.
Reduces Errors
Manual data translation and linking is costly and error-prone. Automating this step in the design process helps reduce mistakes.
Saves Time
PHX ModelCenter eliminates the manual transfer of data between applications, thereby reducing design cycle time. With that "extra" time, you can evaluate more design alternatives which results in a better final product.
Cohesive Team Environment
Your team of engineers can use PHX ModelCenter to coordinate data and share design applications over a network of computers. Design data that used to be sent via fax, email, or ftp can now be linked automatically through PHX ModelCenter.
Easy to Deploy
PHX ModelCenter integrates seamlessly with existing applications used by your entire team.
Expanded OptimizationPak
A collection of optimization algorithms packaged into a single trade study tool within PHX ModelCenter. Users can specify Model variables as objectives (minimize, maximize, or solve for), design variables (discrete or continuous), and constraints. When run, the optimization tool then systematically varies design variables in an attempt to optimize the objectives while not violating any constraints. Resulting charts and reports detail solutions found by the optimizer and help educate the user. The Optimization Pak features over 30 algorithms from leading research organizations including: Boeing’s Design Explorer, Sandia Labs’ DAKOTA, VR&D’s DOT and BIGDOT, and SwarmOps.
RSM Toolkit 3.0
A general purpose multi-dimensional “curve fitting” tool. Given a set of data points the RSM Toolkit can generate a mathematical set of equations that approximate the data. The source data can be generated from a long running simulation or originate from experimental tests. The RSM Toolkit uses a number of different approximation techniques to find a model that works best for your data. Once a response surface is created, it can then be added back into your PHX ModelCenter Model where it can be run just like any other component.
QuickWrap 3.0
QuickWrap is a tool for automating batch mode programs within the Phoenix modeling environment. It can operate as a plug-in to PHX ModelCenter thus enabling it to directly automate file input/output applications. It can also run independently and generate wrappers that can run on Analysis Server. In either mode, QuickWrap provides a graphical application that allows users to point and click to specify variables within files. No programming or scripting is required to automate the application.
Enhanced Workflow
PHX ModelCenter is a general purpose automation tool for modeling and simulation applications. Workflows can be graphically constructed and executed in an easy to use environment without programming or scripting. The resulting workflows are easy to visually understand and can be executed multiple times for purposes of design exploration and optimization.
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Visualize Complex, Multi-Dimensional Design Spaces. Easily Locate Best Designs to Meet Goals.
PHX ModelCenter® enables engineers to automate and integrate design codes and build complex parametric models of systems. When performing trade studies with these models, users sometimes face having to navigate large, complex design spaces using basic plotting tools. Searching for the best designs with optimization algorithms and communicating and justifying results to management less familiar with design optimization technology can be a difficult task. Includes:
- Variable Influence Profiler (VIP)
- Prediction Profiler (PP)
- Data Visualizer
Interpret Data. Communicate and Justify Your Results.
Accessible from PHX ModelCenter' s Data Explorer, the VisualizationPak enables visualizing multi-dimensional design spaces to easily locate best designs and present results in comprehensible HTML design reports.
Variable Sensitivity Analysis
- Visualize key global variable sensitivities-main effects and interaction effects-to focus on most influential variables
- Visualize local variable sensitivities
- Drag control panel's interactive sliders to easily and visually navigate design space in real time
- View key relationships and trends using advanced plotting options including glyph, star glyph, parallel coordinates, scatter, scatter matrix, histogram, and 2D histogram
Design Space Navigation/Optimization
- Change parameters, goals, and constraints on-the-fly
- Locate best designs for specified parameters, goals and constraints
- View Pareto Optimal designs
- Visually follow progress of optimization algorithms
- Visually guide search algorithm within design space
- Generate design comparison reports
BENEFITS
Intuitive, Interactive Design Exploration
- Visualizes copious data in "n" dimensions
- Enables surfing design space in real-time
- Shows real-time impact of design changes
- Increases understanding of trade offs and possibilities
- Improves and expedites design decisions
- Communicate and justify your results to management
"Design by Shopping" Optimization
- Allows design engineer to efficiently "shop" and compare all designs available
- Allows selection of best design after seeing all options
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Multidisciplinary design and analysis plays a vital role in the Phoenix solution. Once the components of your process are integrated, you can employ various design exploration tools to create an optimized design, run what-if trade studies or further inspect the design space to find the weaknesses in your Model. Additional optimization and probabilistic analysis tools provided by third party vendors.
Integrate CAD with ModelCenter analysis.
Phoenix Integration's CAD Fusion bridges the hand-off between Conceptual and Preliminary design, enabling your organization to:
- Introduce high-fidelity CAD/CAE tools earlier into the design process
- Integrate design geometry with trade study analysis
- Increase collaboration between Conceptual and Preliminary design teams
- Detect design problems sooner to reduce rework
- Enable expanded analysis of alternatives through automation of CAD models
Our CAD Fusion plug-ins interface PHX ModelCenter® with leading CAD applications, including Dassault CATIA, PTC® Pro/ENGINEER® and UGS® NX. Each plug-in, without end-user programming or scripting, automatically imports geometry from the CAD application. Designers use CAD variables such as volumes, surface areas, weights, CGs, etc. as variables in ModelCenter and view the impact on CAD geometry as variables are changed in ModelCenter. Geometry can be refreshed for each design iteration in ModelCenter and exported to other applications.
Convergence of Conceptual and Preliminary Design
With CAD Fusion, design teams share a common language for a more collaborative and efficient design process. Preliminary designers can provide early feedback to Conceptual designers to help avoid costly rework later in the design process. Conceptual designers give Preliminary designers a CAD model that already meets many of the design criteria, thus shortening the process.
Value-Added Design Capabilities
CAD Fusion increases the value of both ModelCenter and CAD applications in your organization with:
- Robust CAD automation: CAD tool crash workarounds; CAD memory leak workarounds
- Direct integration with CAD tools: No least common denominator translators; Access special features of each CAD tool; Export multiple file formats from each CAD program; Invoke CAD macros; Run CAD rule checking
- Extract variable units
- Compute commonly used parameters: Volume; Surface Area; Mass Properties
- Show or Hide CAD tool as needed
Specifications
Hardware Minimum
- 1GHz CPU
- 512MB RAM
- 1GB Hard disk space plus space for user data to run
- 800x600 video resolution
Hardware Recommended
- 2GHz Dual Core CPU
- 2GB RAM
- 1GB Hard disk space plus space for user data
- 1024x768 video resolution
Operating System
- MS Windows XP
- MS Windows XP x64
- MS Vista
- MS Vista x64
- MS Windows 7
- MS Windows 7 x64
Optional Software
- Microsoft Excel 97 or greater
- Mathcad 2000i or greater
- Matlab
