The use of Finite Element Analysis (FEA) has grown significantly in past few years across multiple industries, but more importantly, it has expanded across the whole design cycle of accepted to introduce FEA in the early stages of the design cycle in order to speed up the time to products. For some industries, FEA has become crucial for modern engineering. It is also widely market of products. The biggest challenge for some industries is to build a full model with accuracy for FEA and perform all the necessary design changes to evaluate multiple scenarios under real-life conditions. As a breakthrough alternative, Altair SimSolid does not use traditional Fine Element Model to simulate complex assemblies. It takes advantage of fully featured CAD and within minutes performs structural analysis by using an extension of the Theory of External Approximations.

This study demonstrates the use of this meshless analysis method applied to a full assembly of a tugboat ship model with thousands of parts. By eliminating geometry preparation and meshing, the design engineer has more time to understand the performance of the assembly, analyze multiple scenarios and make design changes to improve the performance even before sending the assembly to the analysts.