As you can see we missed the May/June edition of the EKK newsletter. As you will see, this was not because of a lack of things to talk about. Much has been happening this year at EKK. And so, we have the May/June/July/August EKK Super newsletter...

We officially released a Windows® version of our software on June 15, 2005. As promised, the Windows® version of our software runs natively on Windows®, requiring no unix emulation or remote unix machine at all. We are pleased to offer this package to new customers, as it enables them to quickly get our software up and running, and eliminates the overhead involved with having a unix machine in a Windows® environment.

Our initial release of the Windows® version was the 'HPDC Essential' package, which only included the mesh generation and fluid flow software. We have since expanded the offering to include thermal analysis and semipermanent/permanent mold casting processes, as well as sand processes. All of our Windows® products are very competitively priced, so call for a quote today!

There have been quite a few significant enhancements to various components of the CAPCAST software package:

CAPOST

• Cut sections now use the Marching Cube Algorithm (like MESHID), which eliminates the drawing errors we often saw in the old cut section algorithm.
• Variable number of legend intervals has been added, allowing for between 5 and 50 colors in your legend. The legend color selection tool in CAPOST has been enhanced to allow the user to more easily choose the colors they want using a color selection wheel, instead of requiring that the user enter colors in RGB format.
• More image export formats have been added to both CAPOST and MESHID. In addition to PNG images, images can now be exported in any of these formats: BMP, GIF, JPEG, TIFF, or XPM.

KENT

• Selective automatic mesh coarsening has been added, which allows the user to specify which regions of the mesh to coarsen.

MESHID

• GTK port of MESHID is essentially finished, with only a few features missing.
• Element check routines have been added that will highlight regions of the mesh that are connected only by element edge or by single nodes, and also to check for walls that are only 1 element thick. These routines proactively pinpoint areas of the mesh that will cause trouble for the analysis during the mesh generation phase of the simulation.

WRAFTS

• An aspect of our software package that has historically been a bit of a nuisance is the need to compile external functions into WRAFTS if a time dependent velocity or pressure is needed. This includes most every high pressure and low pressure die casting process. Now, WRAFTS allows this data to be entered directly into WRAFTS as input, without requiring the use of external functions. This may sound like a minor improvement, but from a practical standpoint it makes a big difference because now our users aren't required to get down and dirty with writing FORTRAN functions and making sure their computer has the appropriate compilers and libraries needed to compile WRAFTS with that function.
• Another big improvement is the implementation of a new velocity profile tool in the HPDC version of our WRAFTS graphical user interface. A typical HPDC WRAFTS analysis uses a biscuit sized to match the dimensions of the actual biscuit at the end of the shot, with a velocity boundary condition at the tip. It has historically been difficult to determine a shot profile to enter into WRAFTS that will appropriately model what is actually occurring in the process (and because of this we often recommend performing a full shot sleeve analysis, which is the most accurate way to model your process). The new velocity profile tool in gwrafts_hpdc allows the user to enter parameters from the actual shot profile (sleeve length, the fraction of the sleeve that is initially filled with liquid metal, and the breakdown of the actual shot profile) and a suitable shot profile will then be generated for use in the WRAFTS analysis.

We recently took delivery of a workstation with dual Intel Xeon EM64T processors and an NVIDIA Quadro FX 1400 PCI-e video card running RedHat Enterprise Linux WS release 4, so that we could compare the 64-bit Xeon processors to the Opteron / Athlon64, and do further testing with the PCI-e video cards. We're pleased to say that the Xeon processors run comparably to the Opterons, and fortunately we do not have any issues at all with 3D acceleration on this specific video card, under the manufacturer installed RedHat or SuSE 9.2. We still hesitate to recommend the Quadro FX 3400, since that card specifically has given and is still giving us a lot of trouble, but generally speaking the NVIDIA PCI-e video cards work great with LINUX, and simple benchmarks show a nice improvement over the equivalent AGP cards. Drop us an email or give us a call if you have any questions.

We recently setup a subscription with GoToMeeting®, which allows us to have web conferences and online meetings. This service will help us to better serve our customers by allowing us to perform presentations and demos over the internet. If you've been trying to allocate time to see a demonstration of our software, this service can greatly reduce the time commitment. For our Windows® customers (sorry, it's not available on Unix), this tool can help us with support calls, as with your permission we can take over your desktop and physically show you what we are trying to say. Finally, we would like to use this service to demonstrate new features in the software to our existing customers.

If you've called EKK in the past week or so you know that we recently bid adieu to Kathy Longo as she took a full time job with another firm. Fortunately the void left by Kathy has been quickly and easily filled by our new office manager Sherry Nowak. She's already made significant progress towards learning the ropes of running our little company.

We held our annual user meeting on May 19th this year. Our current software users were presented with demonstrations of our software running on Windows®, as well as many updates to our existing CAPCAST package. Following our traditional thai food lunch, we held technical discussions that focused on HPDC simulations, and we also discussed the current state of computer hardware.

Did You Know?

If you are using multiple surface entities with KENT and are finding that KENT assigns a lot of elements near the surface interfaces to the extra GID due to surface imperfections (commonly referred to as 'leaks'), you can use the KENT utility 'Repair for multi-surface' to clean up these elements. We've been using it a bit here at EKK lately, and surprised ourselves with it's effectiveness.

Previous newsletters

March/April 2005
January/February 2005

Past newsletters