EKK, Inc. News Letter - April 2002
EKK will be manning a booth at the AFS expo in Kansas City on May 4-7, 2002. Stop by and talk to us in person. If you are interested in a free impromptu demonstration of our software, we encourage you to bring CAD of a design (preferably STL format) and we can create a mesh and perform a 'quick and dirty' analysis while you wait!
Better Mesh Generation
Last month, we released the latest version of our finite element mesh generator - KENT version 2.2.3. Our customers have been testing out the new KENT, and the verdict is in - this version is MUCH better than before! Many improvements have been made. In short, the latest version is faster than before, it better models curved surfaces, and it better addresses errors in the surface file.
To exemplify the difference between the old KENT and the new KENT, we ran a test on a sample STL file. We first ran the STLTOSRF option in KENT to obtain a SRF file. We noticed that the surface of the casting was not correctly modeled in one region, shown below:
As you can see, the surfaces representing the little knob on the upper right are not actually connected to the other surfaces. This is a somewhat common problem. We wanted to see how the new KENT handled this. Below are the results of running KENT version 2.2.1f on the left, and KENT version 2.2.3c on the right.
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KENT 221f: This is an image of a circular region of the casting meshed with version 2.2.1f. KENT 221f had trouble with the region in the upper right. KENT 221f took 696 seconds to create this mesh. |
KENT 223c: This is an image of a circular region of the casting meshed with version 2.2.3c. This mesh looks far better. KENT 223c took only 244 seconds to create this mesh. |
We have chosen June 13th as the date for the second annual user meeting. On this date we invite our current users to visit us at our office in Walled Lake, Michigan to meet other users, share success stories, and make suggestions for future software improvements. We will also make our team available to any user who wishes to stay an extra day (June 12th or June 14th) for a more personal workshop.
At the user meeting, we plan to unveil a much requested, highly anticipated upgrade to CAPOST and MESHID - rendering through OpenGL! This will allow for dynamic rotation, pan, and zoom. No more clicking two times (anything to avoid double clicking in our *nix world).
Please let us know if you plan to attend by May 31, 2002.
The gentler side of EKK has changed, as our previous administrative assistant Mary Moore recently retired. She was replaced by Eileen Hopkins last month, who has quickly learned the ropes. We used to say 'Mary runs this company'. We are confident that we will soon be able to say the same about Eileen.
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