Mechanical Design/Analysis Integration on Apollo Workstations

Honeywell has selected and integrated hardware and software tools in order to produce a state-of-the-art mechanical engineering workstation. The results of the selection process has led to the recommendations of Apollo computers for the hardware host, GEOMOD for 3D solid modeling, PATRAN for finite element modeling and either ANSYS or NASTRAN for finite element analysis. In order to use the workstation to its fullest, these programs must be integrated so that data generated from one can be passed into another to avoid redundant manual input. In addition, it is desirable for Honeywell to establish a link from the workstation to Computervision for drafting purposes. This would completely automate the entire design/analysis/drafting procedure. The results of Honeywell´s initial experience in this area are the subject of this paper.