The development cycle of products today is complex and involves multiple subsystems. To develop a robust and successful product, engineers need to get a complete understanding of the true systems performance early on in the design cycle. While validation and testing are performed for individual subsystems to check for their specific requirements within the systems engineering process, full-system testing and validation for the complete product is done at a much later stage. This may lead to substantial design changes and reworks that are both cost and time-intensive.

Based on multi-body dynamics solutions technology the ADAMS solver runs nonlinear dynamics in much less time compared to other FEA solutions. The optional modules allow ADAMS users to integrate mechanical components, pneumatics, hydraulics, electronics and control system technologies to treat and build virtual prototypes that take into consideration the interactions between these subsystems.

Key Modules

Adams Machinery

Adams Machinery enables engineers, product designers across the globe to optimize product designs for safety, performance, and comfort with its capabilities to evaluate and manage complex interactions relating to motion, structures, actuation and controls. It empowers machine manufacturers to minimize the number of prototypes, reduce design cycle and meet their functional specifications faster.

The ribbon-style, easy-to-use, intuitive, robust interface and the model browser enable manufacturers to create fully functional and accurate mechanical models. It enables easy pre-processing by automating certain activities such as subsystem connections, geometry creation, etc. and assists post-processing by providing automated plotting and reporting for commonly desired output channels.

Adams Car

It assists engineers in quickly building and testing functional virtual prototypes for vehicle subsystems as well as complete vehicles. The vehicle designs can be simulated in the Adams vertical environment including road conditions and other aspects associated with vehicle testing and easily be analyzed in a substantially lesser time. Adams Car is comprehensive with easy to use contact capabilities supporting 2D and 3D contact between any combination of modal flexible bodies and rigid body geometry.

This can be leveraged by engineers for the analysis of suspension, steering and full-vehicle maneuvers, easy integration of control systems, creation or import of component geometry, model refinement with part flexibility. It has an extensive range of joints and constraints to define part connectivity. Adams Car has a wide range of vertical solutions such as Adams Car, Adams Car Ride, Adams Car Truck, Adams Driveline, Adams SmartDRiver, Adams Tire, and Adams Chassis.

Flexible Multibody Systems

Within the Adams environment, engineers can create flexible parts conveniently even in presence of large overall motion and complex interactions with other modeling elements. Challenges related to material nonlinearity and massive deformations can easily be solved by incorporating both linear and nonlinear flexible body parts. While features for linear flexible parts include Adams Flex and Adams ViewFlex, nonlinear flexible parts can be simulated using FE part, Adams-Marc Co-simulation and Adams MaxFlex.

Adams MaxFlex

Adams MaxFlex enables the representation of geometric nonlinearity, boundary condition nonlinearity as well as material nonlinearity. Implicit Nonlinear finite element analysis is at the core of Adams MaxFlex. An MBD analyst can leverage Adams MaxFlex to enhance model accuracy and to improve simulation efficiency with the shared memory parallel support. Engineers and product designers need not use third-party tools for generating animations as it can be done in Adams/Postprocessor.

Adams Real Time

Key Solutions

Adams Controls and Adams Mechatronics

Adams Flex and Adams Viewflex

High-speed, lightweight, precise mechanical systems are the need of the hour and Adams flex offers the technology to accurately include a component’s flexibility even in the presence of large overall motion and complex interaction with other modeling elements. Integrated with Adams package, Adams Flex offers convenient modeling and robust post-processing capabilities. Adams Flex also can be leveraged for integrating FEA-based flexible bodies into Adams models, better structural compliance representation, high-precision in loads and displacements prediction as well as for exercising broad and convenient control over damping and modal participation.

Leveraging embedded finite element analysis, the Viewflex module in Adams, powered by MSC Nastran, enables users to transform a rigid part to an MNF-based flexible body. It streamlines the process and enhances efficiency, reduces reliance on third-party FEA software and offers an accurate representation of component flexibility.

Adams Durability

Adams Durability enables engineers with a robust durability testing solution to assess stress, strain or life of components within mechanical systems. This is highly essential to avoid product development delays due to late identification of issues, in-service failures, warranty costs and reduce the resultant customer dissatisfaction. Engineers can leverage real-time loads data captured during tests that can be easily correlated to simulation and testing results.

This solution allows direct file input and output in RPC III and DAC formats that further helps in reducing disk space requirements while enhancing the performance. Adams Durability can also be leveraged by engineers to perform modal stress recovery of flexible bodies within Adams environment. Besides, this can be integrated with MSC Fatigue to predict component life and durability. These features make Adams Durability a widely chosen solution to shorten development cycle and minimize high-cost durability testing.

Adams Vibration

Product designs that can ensure an optimal NVH (Noise, Vibration, Harshness) level can be challenging to achieve and running multiple physical tests for optimizing NVH is draining cost, resources and time. Adams Vibration uses frequency domain analysis to enable engineers to easily analyse the forced vibration of mechanical systems.

Further, this can be used for analyzing the forced response of a model in the frequency domain over multiple operating points, creating input/output channels for vibration analysis and evaluating frequency response functions for magnitude and phase characteristics. Engineers can leverage Adams Vibration for animating forced and individual mode response, recording contribution of model elements to kinetic, static, and dissipative energy distribution in system modes and specify frequency domain input functions, such as swept sine amplitude/ frequency, power spectral density (PSD), and rotational imbalance.