Upfront CAD – Parametric Design

CAESES

CAESES®‘ foundation is a powerful and flexible 3D parametric modeler. From the start, the modeling capabilities were specifically developed for simulation, especially CFD. Unlike traditional CAD tools, the main focus is the smart design of complex flow-exposed functional surfaces. For example, pumps, ship hulls, aircraft wings, arbitrarily shaped ducts, and turbomachinery blades are complex 3D shapes that are critical for achieving good performance in terms of the fluids flowing around or through them.

The innovative and proprietary modeling architecture allows you to create these geometries using intuitive parameters that are of direct relevance with regards to your design practices. With traditional CAD, your main design parameters include primary dimensions such as lengths, angles, and offsets. In CAESES® you can additionally specify smart parameters and distributions of these parameters such as curvature, cross-sectional area, volumetric displacement, center of buoyancy, etc.

Many of customers use CAESES® as their primary CAD tool, whereas others use it as an upfront CAD tool in a collaborative and integrated way with their traditional design and production CAD (e.g. CATIA, NX, Pro/E, SolidWorks). These traditional tools, although powerful, are detail-oriented and encompass features which may not be relevant for simulation. Naturally the extensive features of traditional tools means that they are not perfectly suited for specialized tasks such as driving a CFD-centric product development process.

Furthermore, specialized CAD designers are often the bottleneck to the CFD specialists, who rely on them for supplying the CAD model which they use as a basis for simulation. Instead, the CFD engineers can use CAESES® to build specialized and flexible models that perfectly suite their exact needs. When the optimized model is finalized, then CAESES® can pass the geometric data to the traditional CAD tool in order to continue the PLM process.

CAD Capabilities

  • Specialized meta surfaces for sweeps with custom parameter distributions
  • Common NURBS curves and surfaces
  • Intersection and projection points and curves
  • Smooth and fairness optimized curves for connecting 3D positions
  • NACA curves
  • Developable surface
  • Boolean Operations for solid objects
  • Fillet modeling, e.g. constant radius fillet between two surfaces
  • Trimmed surfaces
  • Shift and free form (box) deformation entities for applying quick changes to existing geometries (only pro edition)
  • Surface triangulations with snapping mechanisms for robust creation of closed volumes
  • Common imports and exports (IGES, STL, STEP, Parasolid, ACIS, DXF, VTK)
  • And much much much more …

Parametric Design for Blades of Turbomachinery

Yes, CAESES® is also a full blade design tool! Besides general CAD functionality, it provides comprehensive parametric design modeling capabilities on top of CAESES® for the design of propeller blades, axial blades (turbines/compressors), as well as centrifugal impellers. Everything is geared towards efficient shape optimization, so the variable blade geometries of CAESES® are perfectly suited for automated studies. Fully customize your own blade model and save optimization time with much less – but smarter – degrees of freedom. CAESES® comes with everything you need e.g. any kind of profile systems such as (z,r*theta), (m’,theta), (m, r*theta), (m’,beta), … Give it a try!

Your Benefits

Besides the fun you will have with CAESES®, you will save weeks and months of time per year (and thus money!) by using specialized and highly robust geometry models, that allow you to immediately create design variants of your product in the pre-CAD phase. Typically, CAESES® users save a tremendous amount of time by being able to work with their own models in their simulation department, instead of iterating with the CAD department.

Next: Upfront CFD