Supported Nastran Style Data Deck Cards

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The table below shows a list of data cards that Cadfil generates and it shows which are supported by three popular solvers that use the NASTRAN bulk data type data deck. These are MSC Nastran, Siemens Simcenter Nastran (formerly known as NX Nastran) and OptiStruct from Altair Engineering. In general most of the cards used are common across all three systems but some, for example the material properties for laminated solid elements take basically the same data via different card formulations ( PCOMPLS or PCOMPS in this example). Where such mutual exclusivity exits there is usually an option in the CAdfil parameters for the user to select which is to be created (if it is required). The detail of the option in the PCOMPLS/PCOMPS example can be seen by following the link. Another set that is user selectable is the 3D orthotropic material property which can be MAT11/MATORT/MAT9OR/MAT9ORT dependant on context. It is indented in a future version of CAdfil to be able to pick 'Flavours' which will set initial defaults suitable;e for a specific solver/software

To add a little history for anyone that is interested... In the late 1960s under United States government funding for the aerospace industry the NASTRAN software development started. NASTRAN is a finite element analysis (FEA) program that was originally developed for NASA. The MacNeal-Schwendler Corporation (MSC) was one of the principal and original developers of the publicly available NASTRAN code. NASTRAN source code is integrated in a number of different software packages, which are distributed by a range of companies some using the NASTRAN name and others not. Many of these systems started from a common software code base in 2001 as there was an Anti-Trust legal case in the USA that forced MSC to share some source code in the interests of free and fair competition. Since that time the range of data input types (data cards) have been increased and expanded in different ways by different companies.

A set of new options in OptiStruct ( STACK/PLY/PCOMPP/DRAPE) relate to new technology features in OptiStruct and have no equivalents in other systems at this time, the topic New Technology FEA (Continuous Grid Mapping) has more information on use of this option.