PLANO, Texas & SHANGHAI--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Siemens PLM Software, a business unit of the Siemens Industry Automation Division and a leading global provider of product lifecycle management (PLM) software and services, today announced the latest enhancements added to NX™ software, the company’s integrated computer-aided design, manufacturing and engineering analysis (CAD/CAM/CAE) solution.

Presented at The World Exposition Shanghai China 2010 (Expo 2010), the latest enhancements to NX 7 include significant new functionality throughout all aspects of the software. In addition, NX, together with Teamcenter® software, Siemens PLM Software’s digital lifecycle management system, are the first products to support Siemens PLM Software’s new High Definition PLM (HD-PLM) technology framework, unveiled today in a separate announcement.

“Our new HD-PLM technology framework, delivers a visually intuitive environment in NX to enhance the decision making process throughout product development and create significant value for our customers and our industry,” said Joan Hirsch, vice president of Product Design Solutions, Siemens PLM Software. “The value of this release is further magnified not only by the strength of its many enhancements, but also for the balanced level of new functionality added throughout the software’s various product design, analysis and part manufacturing modules, which can produce end user productivity gains of as much as 80 percent.”

High definition decision making in product development

With the launch of the high definition 3D (HD3D) environment announced last year and enhanced in the latest release of NX, Siemens PLM Software begins to execute on its vision to instill HD-PLM technology into all of its enterprise solutions. HD3D unites the powers of NX and Teamcenter under the HD-PLM technology framework to visually and intuitively deliver the information necessary to understand, collaborate, and make decisions in a globally distributed product development environment.

HD3D delivers on the four tenets of HD-PLM with a product development decision support and analytics solution that personalizes the user’s experience by placing them in the proper context, assists proactively with task accomplishment to help make collaborative decisions, clarifies the user’s experience by presenting information intuitively and validates user decisions against established rationale. An efficient alternative to navigating and processing lists of attribute data and manually correlating them to 3D product models, HD3D enables the user to visually comprehend PLM data with interactive navigation, and to drill down to details as needed. Viewing a product’s 3D representation, users can easily get into the right context to instantly answer questions about project status, design changes, team responsibilities, issues, problems, cost, suppliers and other attributes. Color-coding, on-screen tagging and legends enable fast visual assessment and interpretation of product development issues and decision criteria.

HD3D also works with NX validation checking tools, providing direct visual interaction that accelerates the validation of product designs against requirements. Visually rich feedback allows the user to monitor critical functional requirements throughout development, supporting rapid decision making with a high level of confidence to ensure and maximize product quality.

“Siemens PLM Software has shifted up a gear with this release and is extending the HD-PLM concept with integration of HD3D across a wider spread of its product range,” said Al Dean, Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder, DEVELOP3D Magazine. “The ability to use NX and Teamcenter to visualize data often hidden inside a database in a graphically and contextually rich manner enables rapid assessment of a wide variety of product development issues and potential bottlenecks. That, in turn, allows everyone involved in the process to make informed decisions with a higher degree of confidence and much greater efficiency. This should result in a big productivity boost for their customers.”

Redefining product design productivity

In addition to its support of HD-PLM, NX 7 contains a wealth of new features and enhancements to redefine product development productivity. Enhancements to NX 7 within its tightly integrated CAD applications include rapid design tools such as streamlined sketch creation, extension of synchronous technology to transform freeform modeling and new DraftingPlus tools to dramatically enhance 2D design and drafting.

• New rapid design tools accelerate 2D profile creation and positioning, automatically inferring constraints and modeling intent. As result, the time needed to create models from scratch can be reduced by up to 50 percent.
• The integration of groundbreaking synchronous technology with NX freeform modeling dramatically alters the advanced shaping process by making it easy to work with any geometry, including imported models. Users can start with simple prismatic or analytic geometry and use advanced shaping tools to form complex organic models in significantly less time.
• Additional extensions of synchronous technology offer enhancements to patterned features, assemblies, thin-walled geometry, blends, chamfers, and streamlined methods for geometry re-use.
• NX DraftingPlus is a new set of design tools that further enhance the 2D functionality in NX and its integration with 3D models. A role-based interface puts the user in the right context for 2D design work, and robust functionality such as powerful curve creation and modification tools along with the ability to generate 3D geometry from 2D curves, eliminates steps and streamlines the product design process. NX DraftingPlus enables full, single-system integration of 2D and 3D design workflows, eliminating any need to use separate 2D CAD software.

Redefining product analysis and simulation productivity

The NX design and analysis environment has already been proven to dramatically reduce the amount of time engineers spend validating product performance as the design evolves. The latest release of NX delivers the largest number of enhancements ever made to its CAE functionality. These enhancements redefine CAE productivity by further improving integration with product design, extending NX CAE leadership in multi-physics solutions and launching new offerings that correlate digital simulation models with measured test data. As a result, engineers can make better decisions in less time to create superior products.

• Integrated design and CAE productivity is further enhanced in NX 7 with new model preparation workflows that assist users working with complex geometry, meshing thin-walled parts, enhancing beam and bolt modeling, and much more. Many enhancements streamline the flow of data between design and analysis including significant improvements to laminate composite analysis workflows. Through its intuitive approach to the finite element modeling of assemblies, NX simplifies the way analysts work with large complex models and allows engineers to work with systems models that update as design fidelity increases.
• NX CAE expands its outstanding integration with the broadest set of solver technologies by adding new integrated multi-physics solutions that include durability and motion analysis with flexible bodies, as well as more solutions for structural, thermal and flow analyses. Analyzing part flexibility in mechanisms is important because it can affect the geometry and lead to serious design issues. With NX 7, engineers can validate designs using higher fidelity models that combine elastic deformation and rigid body motion to evaluate the effect of component flexibility on mechanism performance and durability.
• NX 7 introduces two new CAE products, NX Finite Element (FE) Model Correlation and NX FE Model Updating. These new offerings represent an analysis-oriented system, with an intuitive user interface that is tailored to the needs of the CAE analyst. They provide a complete, integrated system for modal analysis, pre-test planning, test-analysis correlation and model updating.

“When analysis results demand design changes, we can apply these efficiently using synchronous technology,” said Jerry Baffa, Project Engineer, Research Department, Damen Shipyards. “Re-meshing is effortless and results in very short design cycles.”

Redefining part manufacturing productivity

The combination of the integrated CAM and CMM capabilities in NX represent one of the world’s most sophisticated software solutions for part manufacturing. NX 7 further redefines part manufacturing productivity with the introduction of two new applications that put the user in the context of a specific programming task, dramatically reducing the time needed to program complex turbo-machinery components, and maximizing the efficiency of offline coordinate measuring machine (CMM) programming.

• NX Turbomachinery Milling accelerates the NC programming process for complex 5-axis multi-bladed rotational parts. This integrated NX CAM application for blisk and impeller machining offers a set of automated, context-specific functions that greatly simplify the task of creating the smart tool paths necessary for these complex parts. The new capability is supported by a wide range of existing functions in NX CAM such as machining simulation that is driven directly from the post processor output, helping to validate NC programming decisions. NX Turbomachinery Milling can help produce higher-quality results in half the time of ordinary milling software.
• NX CMM Inspection Programming works in the context of a 3D solid model environment that includes the coordinate measuring machine and the part. Driven by automation, inspection features and probing paths are generated directly and automatically from the PMI (product and manufacturing information) data attached to the 3D design model, producing potential reductions in inspection programming time as high as 80 percent. This integrated application is complete with simulation and collision avoidance to help validate CMM programming decisions, and machine and probe library content to significantly improve CMM programming efficiency.

“NX Turbomachinery Milling offers a significant productivity advantage for the NC programmer with an application designed especially for blisk and impeller programming, while the highly automated NX CMM functionality makes inspection programming an integral part of the PLM process,” said Dr. Charles Clarke, noted CAD/CAM consultant and writer. “This latest release of NX takes Siemens PLM Software into a new level of part manufacturing productivity.”

Siemens PLM Software is providing an overview of NX 7 today at EXPO 2010 in Shanghai and again next month at the Siemens PLM Connection Americas User Conference in Dallas, Texas. For more information on NX 7, please visit www.siemens.com/plm/nx7.

About Siemens PLM Software

Siemens PLM Software, a business unit of the Siemens Industry Automation Division, is a leading global provider of product lifecycle management (PLM) software and services with 6.7 million licensed seats and more than 63,000 customers worldwide. Headquartered in Plano, Texas, Siemens PLM Software works collaboratively with companies to deliver open solutions that help them turn more ideas into successful products. For more information on Siemens PLM Software products and services, visit www.siemens.com/plm.

About the Siemens Industry Automation Division

The Siemens Industry Automation Division (Nuremberg, Germany) is a worldwide leader in the fields of automation systems, industrial controls and industrial software. Its portfolio ranges from standard products for the manufacturing and process industries to solutions for whole industrial sectors that encompass the automation of entire automobile production facilities and chemical plants. As a leading software supplier, Industry Automation optimizes the entire value added chain of manufacturers – from product design and development to production, sales and a wide range of maintenance services. With around 39,000 employees worldwide (September 30), Siemens Industry Automation achieved sales of €7.0 billion in fiscal year 2009. www.siemens.com/industryautomation

Note: Siemens and the Siemens logo are registered trademarks of Siemens AG. NX and Teamcenter are trademarks or registered trademarks of Siemens Product Lifecycle Management Software Inc. or its subsidiaries in the United States and in other countries. All other trademarks, registered trademarks or service marks belong to their respective holders.

Siemens PLM Software
Jim Phelan, 314-264-8216
jim.phelan@siemens.com