Version 6.6 is a major release of ABAQUS. There are significant new features and enhancements in all ABAQUS products, including the following:
Color coding is now supported throughout all ABAQUS/CAE modules, which enables you to apply color coding for viewable geometry and mesh settings. This feature also unifies color assignments across modules: when you create color assignments in one module, ABAQUS/CAE can display those color assignments in all other applicable modules and carries these assignments into the Visualization module as well (“Color coding in ABAQUS/CAE,” Section 2.8).
You can add or modify constraints to control the geometry in a sketch in ABAQUS/CAE and create parametric equations to relate pieces of geometry. Several new tools and options are available, and the functionality of many existing sketch creation and editing tools has been enhanced (“Sketcher constraints and tools,” Section 4.1).
ABAQUS/Standard offers adaptive remeshing, which can improve the quality of your simulation results by automating the process of refining a mesh to reach a particular level of accuracy. Adaptive remeshing can also help you create a refined mesh in a specified region, such as near a stress riser or in a region of plastic deformation (“Using ABAQUS/CAE to adaptively remesh regions in a model,” Section 6.1).
ABAQUS includes the following performance enhancements in this release:
Memory requirements for ABAQUS/Explicit analyses have been further reduced, and both serial and parallel performance have been enhanced significantly (“Memory reductions and performance improvements for ABAQUS/Explicit analyses,” Section 2.4).
The quasi-Newton solution technique has been enhanced in ABAQUS/Standard to offer significant performance advantages over the default Newton method for some nonlinear static and dynamic simulations (“Quasi-Newton solution technique,” Section 6.12).
The new ABAQUS/AMS eigensolver offers significant performance advantages over the default Lanczos method, particularly when a large number of eigenmodes is required for a system with many degrees of freedom (“Addition of automatic multi-level substructuring (AMS) eigensolver for natural frequency extraction,” Section 6.14).
Several enhancements have been introduced to improve ABAQUS damage modeling capabilities:
Cohesive elements can now be used in import analyses (“Cohesive element import,” Section 6.4).
ABAQUS/CAE now offers extensive coverage of damage models, including the damage initiation and evolution capabilities that were previously available in ABAQUS/Explicit (“Damage in ABAQUS/CAE,” Section 7.2).
ABAQUS/CAE and ABAQUS/Standard provide a capability that allows anisotropic damage in fiber-reinforced composite laminae to be modeled without the strong mesh dependency that is often characteristic of softening behavior (“Damage model for fiber-reinforced composite materials,” Section 7.8).
Viscoelastic material models can now be used in an import analysis to transfer results between ABAQUS/Explicit and ABAQUS/Standard and vice versa or to transfer results from one ABAQUS/Standard analysis to another. Importing viscoelastic material models enables you to use new analysis techniques for tire analyses and glass forming analyses, as described in “Viscoelastic material import,” Section 6.5.
Numerous enhancements have been implemented to improve contact functionality, convergence, and robustness in both ABAQUS/Standard and ABAQUS/Explicit (Chapter 11, “Interactions”).
A surface-to-surface formulation has been added for finite-sliding contact in ABAQUS/Standard. This formulation is similar to the surface-to-surface formulations introduced for small-sliding contact and mesh tie constraints in Version 6.5 (“Finite-sliding, surface-to-surface contact,” Section 11.2).
Domain-level parallelization in ABAQUS/Explicit now supports both the modeling of edge-to-edge contact (“Parallelization of edge-to-edge contact in ABAQUS/Explicit,” Section 11.5) and the modeling of contact with eroding solid bodies (“Parallelization of contact with eroding solids in ABAQUS/Explicit,” Section 11.6).
Analytical rigid surfaces can now be used with the general contact algorithm, which enables you to create an exact representation of many curved geometries with analytical rigid surfaces by parameterizing the surface with curved line segments. This enhancement provides a smoother surface description, which can reduce contact noise and provide a better approximation of the physical contact constraint (“Analytical surfaces in general contact in ABAQUS/Explicit,” Section 11.7).
ABAQUS/Viewer offers a wide range of animation enhancements, including synchronization of animations in different viewports, control over active steps and frames, animation of X–Y plots, and export to VRML format. These enhancements and other visualization improvements are described in Chapter 14, “Output and visualization.”
Version 6.6 is released on CD-ROM. Products supported on each of the following combinations of supported operating systems and processors are summarized below:
Linux/x86-32 (supports interactive and analysis products)
Linux/x86-64 (supports interactive and analysis products)
Windows/x86-32 (supports interactive and analysis products)
HP-UX/Itanium (supports analysis products only)
Linux/Itanium (supports analysis products only)
Technical SupportSystems Information on the ABAQUS Home Page. For more information, see Appendix A, “System requirements,” of the ABAQUS Installation and Licensing Guide.ABAQUS Version 6.6 uses FLEXnet Licensing Version 10.8 from Macrovision Corporation (upgraded from FLEXlm Version 9.2 for ABAQUS Version 6.5) for license management. For more information, see “Licensing installation procedure,” Section 2.1.2 of the ABAQUS Installation and Licensing Guide.