FEA Made Easy.

As a designer and Engineer you can spend a significant amount of your time trying to get original CAD data ready for FEA studies. This entails suppressing non-structural parts, supressing features like holes and bolted connections and in extreme cases remodelling.

This is particularly true for welded and bolted fabrications including sheet metal and structural frame type components. This is required to make the mesh process as smooth as possible whilst trying to keep element numbers sufficiently low to enable faster FEA run times.

Taking out geometry simplification and meshing can make the FEA process simple and easy to use allowing designers and engineers to adopt FEA in their workplace to make optimised and innovative products.

Altair SimSolid simulation technology for designers, engineers, and analysts eliminates geometry preparation and meshing: the two most time-consuming, expertise-extensive, and error-prone tasks performed in a conventional structural simulation.

Read how our customer Pentre Engineering has introduced SimSolid to their design process and is achieving super-fast structural analysis in their designs and what took them 3-4 days of effort is now reduced to a matter of hours.

Find out more about SimSolid for yourself and download a free trial.

Building Services Consulting - Model Health Check: Looking after the health and well-being of your project

 As a fan of motorsport, particularly anything with two wheels and an engine, I will start this article by comparing a motorcycle race to Excitech’s Building Services Consulting services.

Some of Excitech’s services provide a more integrated approach to supporting you and the delivery of your project, with Excitech perhaps providing that pit crew to support, advise and maintain your effort for the duration of the race. However, if you are looking for a lighter touch then you could think of a model health check as something more aligned to an interim service that gives you the confidence that you are on track, or that may be a few areas are in need of attention before you continue on your journey.

I will now focus on the Revit MEPModel Health Checkandconsiders how a planned snapshot of your Revit MEP project can put your delivery team in a strong and confident position to continue moving forward.

As the building services industry changes and adapts to keep in step with the requirements of Building Information Modelling and the use of Revit MEP, it is becoming increasingly important to be confident of the condition of your project model and the associated data. A model health check can be arranged at any time, can occur multiple times during a project, and can be aligned with specific project stages.

Projects can sometimes overrun and miss deadlines due to underestimating the time needed to complete specific tasks. A model health check will identify potential issues that in turn can help with resourcing and scheduling due to a stronger understanding of the scale of any work required to align your model with project requirements.

Timely checking of areas such as readiness of models for submission to project partners, suitability for clash detection, submission of data, and robust modeling techniques will give you the tools to make informed choices and measured responses to any issues discovered.

To make sure the model health check meets your specific requirements and the results used to the best effect we will:

• Gain a thorough understanding of your project model and your requirements

• Provide an agreed scope of works

• Report on any issues discovered

• Identify any skill gaps or other problems preventing resolution of issues

• Discuss and present options for overcoming such issues

For more information about our Building Services Consulting services, visit our website.

 https://www.symetri.co.uk/buildings-infrastructure/building-services

Building Services Consulting | Pre-project Assessments - keeping your project on track

Building Services Consulting services are available to support you start any project from a position of strength and stays on track throughout.

Whether you are new to Revit MEP and BIM, or if you have a few projects behind you, the areas assessed can benefit any organisation as it grows and develops in this rapidly changing industry.

There are key areas to consider when looking to reduce exposure to risk, reduce project delays, and gain any kind of productivity or competitive advantage when undertaking a BIM project using Revit MEP. A Pre-project Assessment will put your organisation in a great position to address areas of concern before starting a new project.

A Pre-project Assessment will review the following areas in the form of interviews with key staff, assessments, and reviews of standards and documentation:

• Hardware and software suitability 

• Delivery team readiness 

• Project-specific Revit MEP standards

• Information delivery requirements

• Potential training and support needs

• Project collaboration 

• Additional project requirements such as clash detection and reporting

Issues in any of these areas can result in problems occurring at any stage of project delivery, from initial resourcing and planning through to final deliverables. Therefore, why not prepare every aspect of your organisation for project delivery from the outset.

Initial reports and information from the Pre-Project Assessment will form the basis of presentation and discussion with an Excitech consultant, with measured results providing a clear understanding and scale for each of the areas assessed. An accurate picture of your current and future position can be established allowing you to make informed decisions on the best way forward for your organisation. Follow-up reports and recommendations from an Excitech consultant will allow you to consider the area’s most critical to your organisation and to successful project delivery, with the option of a strategic implementation of any of those recommendations.

A targeted training program to strengthen a known skill gap in a delivery team, an update to project templates and an update of hardware or IT infrastructure can be the solution to saving time and possible re-work during project delivery.

For more information about our Building Services consulting services, visit our website

https://www.symetri.co.uk/buildings-infrastructure/building-services