Altair MotionSolve 2021.1 Release Notes

General

New Features

Upgraded Intel® MKL
MotionSolve relies on the industry-wide accepted Intel® Math Kernel Library (MKL) for its math routines. These routines are highly optimized and threaded for maximum performance. With this release, MotionSolve upgraded the version of the MKL from 2017 to 2019.5. In rare instances, this upgrade can affect MotionSolve simulation results for highly sensitive models. In other words, models that entail sources of indeterminism.

Enhancements

MotionSolve and EDEM Co-simulation - General
MotionSolve can interface with Altair EDEM, a state-of-the-art bulk material simulation tool. In previous versions, the integration step size in EDEM had to be an exact multiple of the communication step size between MotionSolve and EDEM. This restriction has been removed in this release. You can now select any integration step size in EDEM, providing a better user experience and potentially faster co-simulation.
Track Model
In release 2021, Altair’s Multibody Dynamics products (MotionView and MotionSolve) introduced a new continuous track plug-in for tracked vehicles, such as bulldozers, excavators, robots, snowmobiles, and military vehicles. The track plug-in automatically assembles a continuous band of treads or track plates driven and suspended by two or more wheels that can interact with a soft-soil surface. In this release, the soft-soil of the track plug-in has been enhanced two-fold. First, the soft-soil can now be visualized in MotionView and HyperView for a better user experience. Second, you can choose to rigidify the soft-soil just by selecting a flag. Many track designs are being investigated on rigid grounds, such as a paved road, before they are tested on soft-soil, which made this enhancement necessary.
Support OML-based User Subroutines
Since release 2020.1, MotionSolve supports subroutines that are scripted in the OpenMatrix Language (OML). Initially, only an embedded OML interpreter that supports the basic OML syntax was available but did not include/support any of the additional toolboxes and libraries. In release 2021, MotionSolve was enhanced to connect with the installation of Altair Compose to interpret OML-based subroutines. This enhancement provided access to hundreds of powerful math operations and built-in functions in Altair Compose. Both features, the embedded interpreter and connection to Compose, were available only on the Windows operating system. With this release, support of OML-based user subroutines has been extended to the Linux operating system as well.

Resolved Issues

  • Some multi-threaded simulations fail due to issues in the 2017 Intel Math Kernel Library (MKL). MKL has been upgraded to 2019.5.
  • Solver used to ignore issues with Parasolid graphics if the graphics are used only in the post-processing. The solver can now alert you before the simulation starts if there are any issues detected with the Parasolid graphics.
  • Some rotational machinery models display noisy torque values. This has been addressed by improving the Jacobian re-evaluations for torque dominating problems.