LiveLink™ for AUTOCAD®

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LiveLink™ for AUTOCAD®

Utilize Simulation to Take Your AutoCAD® Designs Further
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Image made using the COMSOL Multiphysics® software and is provided courtesy of COMSOL.

Electric current simulation of a foil wire from a solar collector based on a surface geometry in AutoCAD®

LiveLink™ for AUTOCAD®


Effectively Combine COMSOL Multiphysics®Simulations with Autodesk® AutoCAD® Designs

LiveLink™ for AutoCAD® provides essential functionality to enhance your design workflow with multiphysics simulation so you can evaluate how your product or process performs in the intended operating environment. The powerful tools in the AutoCAD CAD system allow you to produce effective 3D product designs. Using LiveLink™ for AutoCAD®, you can synchronize your CAD models with COMSOL Multiphysics® to create model geometries for simulation that allow you to analyze essentially any physical effects and their interactions, so you can better understand and optimize your designs.

LiveLink™ for AutoCAD® includes an array of tools to facilitate the integration of multiphysics simulation into your design process. Features include geometry repair and defeaturing, support for automatic updates to a CAD design, optimization of design parameters, and automated parametric sweeps in COMSOL Multiphysics.

Synchronize Geometries and Maintain Physics Definitions

LiveLink™ for AutoCAD® synchronizes geometry updates between your AutoCAD design file and the COMSOL Multiphysics model. Updates are automatic when you have both AutoCAD and COMSOL Multiphysics open at the same time avoiding the repetitive file import and export process. CAD model parameters defined in AutoCAD can be iteratively accessed to enable parametric sweeps in COMSOL Multiphysics. Optimization studies or parametric sweeps allow you to fine-tune design parameters such as part shape and sizing.

An important feature of LiveLink™ for AutoCAD® is that geometry associativity is maintained between the synchronized CAD design and the COMSOL Multiphysics model even when a design has changed. As a result of this functionality, physics definitions also remain associated with their respective model domains and boundaries throughout the design and simulation process.


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Product Features

Models

Product Features

  • A LiveLink™ interface that synchronizes between the AutoCAD® 2016 or 2017 versions of the CAD software and COMSOL Multiphysics® when both are running simultaneously
  • Synchronize 3D geometric objects (solids and surfaces) between AutoCAD® geometries and COMSOL Multiphysics®
  • The synchronized geometry is associative, i.e., the CAD model can be modified in AutoCAD®without the need to re-apply model settings in COMSOL Multiphysics® after re-synchronization
  • Automatically generate selections on the synchronized geometry in the COMSOL Multiphysics® model from the material texture assignments in the AutoCAD® file.
  • Synchronize parameters between the AutoCAD® design and COMSOL Multiphysics® model to modify the COMSOL Multiphysics® geometry, either manually or as controlled by a parametric or optimization solver
  • Connect to COMSOL Server™ from within AutoCAD® to browse and run apps together with AutoCAD®, including those that use geometry synchronized with AutoCAD®.
  • File import of the most popular CAD file formats, see table below
  • Encapsulate geometries to model phenomena in the surrounding domains
  • Export geometry files to the Parasolid® and ACIS® file formats
  • Geometry repair through identification of geometric inconsistencies and knitting surfaces to create solids
  • Defeaturing through the finding and deletion of fillets, short edges, sliver faces, small faces, and spikes
  • Manually deleting faces and healing the resulting gaps through filling (creating a new face) or patching (shrinking or expanding adjacent faces)
  • Detaching faces from a solid object to create a new solid object
  • Cap holes or empty spaces to fill the space and create modeling domains
  • Patch removed faces by growing or shrinking the surrounding surfaces to cover the removed face

Models

This tutorial model of the Joule heating effect in a busbar demonstrates how to synchronize geometry between AutoCAD and COMSOL, how to modify the geometry from COMSOL, and how to run a geometric parametric sweep.

» See model.

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