NEiNastran's popularity in the maritime industry continues to grow as we gain more visibility and introduce more engineers to our product and technical support. NEi continue to add new seats with our current customers as we expand to attract more new users every month. While all this is happening, we're also working with a number of other marine software companies to provide interfaces to our Nastran solver in order to help the engineer be more productive and to integrate NEiNastran further into the marine industry.

Newsletters like this, and the feedback we receive from it, will help us provide our development staff with the input they need to add the customer driven enhancements you need to handle your unique analysis needs.

Customer Driven Solutions

added enhancements specifically for the maritime market. That approach has resulted in a tremendous growth for us in the maritime community."

Now, in addition to listening to what our customers are looking from us, we get to share in their success stories. Customer comments and testimonials are common these days here at NEi. Recently, we received the following comment from Chris Holmes, Portsmouth Naval

Shipyard, regarding the new contact element feature in NE V8.3. "Using NEiNastran for this analysis has produced a simulation that was not possible with MSC.Nastran. Prior to using NE, I was using MSC and had to run this model in linear mode due to the high number of contact surfaces."

In future newsletters, we will use this forum as a way to better inform you of the activities within the maritime market.

Noran Engineering, Inc. a global provider of FEA solver solutions and services today announced the release of NEiNastran V8.3, the latest version of NEiNastran. This release features the most comprehensive enterprise solution for analysis as well as a new advanced dynamic solution, a more robust shell element, a new spot weld element, a faster Lanczos eigensolver, substructuring and model

reduction, new aerospace and automotive productivity tools, and over 45 additional customer driven enhancements.

Tony Abbey, Technical Manager, commented; "Many of our clients are faced with ever larger and more complex simulation problems. We have been able to directly improve their productivity by listening to their analysis requirements, producing

enhancements and putting them into this latest NEiNastran V8.3 release. Noran Engineering is committed to providing the best tools for these challenging analyses. We are already positioning for new features in the 8.4 release. The future is exciting for our client."

NEiNastran V8.4 will include support for the linear mode of Anteon's Underwater Shock Analysis (USA) software. The interface is extremely easy to use and only involves specifying the wet surface using a standard NASTRAN pressure load definition. The analysis is run in two parts. First a linear direct transient response solution is run where the wet surface is called out in the Nastran model input file

Case Control section via a USAWETSURFACE command. The analysis is run and terminates after the USA input file is generated. Then the analyst simply runs the USA program and an input file is generated for NEiNastran. NEiNastran is then restarted (using the NEiNastran Editor this is simply a different menu pick) and the USA input file is read in and the analysis. As always, it was great to meet

clients we have known for several years, to see how they are benefiting from NEiNastran and to hear about enhancements they want in the code. It is also especially rewarding to meet proceeds generating transient responses results quantities such as displacements, velocities, accelerations and element results measures.

Noran Engineering, Inc. (Westminster, CA; www.NENastran.com) a global leader in simulation software and technologies, today announced a record first quarter earnings report.

Total revenues in the first quarter were a record 280% over the same period last year.

60% of the business revenues were from new accounts and 40% were expanded business from our existing clients.

Major accounts in Q1 include: Northrop Grumman Ship Systems, Naval Surface Warfare Center, NextGen Aeronautics, BAE Systems, Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, NASSCO, and MacDonald Dettwiler, Canada.

"The first quarter results reinforce our commitment to Customer Driven Solutions, said David Branch, Director of World Wide Sales. "We continue to see

additional new business from our loyal list of customer/partners. This is the result of adding the functionality requested by our clients. We are not bogged down with disagreeing developers. Our competitors can take as long as two to three years to add functionality requested by their clients. We can add this functionality immediately to the next major release. In mid 2003 we added functionality requested by our maritime clients that has resulted in new business opportunities within the maritime market. In the first quarter of this year we have already surpassed our entire last year's revenue in that industry."

"Our customer base is showing indications that they are committed to our solutions and are dropping their maintenance contracts with our competitors. We are receiving customer testimonials weekly about our technical support and hotline teams. The new clients are please

that someone actually answers the phone and immediately starts to solve their issue."

The outlook for 2004 is quite promising for Noran Engineering. Later this year we will be announcing our release of NEiCAD. It will be a linear tool that runs internally to the CAD system. This will allow the designers to perform analysis directly on the CAD geometry's What sets this product apart from the competition is simple. The output files from this system can be read directly into the Noran Engineering NEiNastran solution or MSC's Nastran solutions. No other low end linear product has a bulk data file that can be read by so many analysis tools. This will allow the analytical departments to run more advanced analysis. Noran will be sending a press release in early June that better describes this new technology.

- If you have 1GB of RAM or more, set RAM=1500 in the Memory Management Directives.
- Set SPARSEITERMODE=2 under Solution Processor Parameters.
- Set DECOMPMETHOD=PCGLSS under Program Control Directives.
- If you have a dual processor machine, NEiNastran V8.3 supports parallel processing during the PCGLSS solution. To turn this on set NPROCESSORS=2 under Program Control Directives

The following settings will affect solution accuracy and should only be used for checkout runs:

- Set SPARSEITERTOL=1.E-3 under Solution Processor Parameters. This will avoid extra iterations that are not necessary in a 'checkout' run.
- Set QUADINODE=OFF under Geometry Processor Parameters. This setting will result in a loss of accuracy by turning off the internal node generation for quad elements, but will speed up the solution time.

Pitfalls
Make sure you only use these settings during checkout runs when accuracy is not a concern. When performing production runs, check to make sure these settings are returned to their defaults for the best accuracy.

Example
A 766,000 Degree of Freedom ship model was run with default NEiNastran settings and ran in 23 minutes on a Dual Intel Xeon 2.4 GHz system with 2GB RAM. The same model was run with the 'checkout' settings above and ran in only 14 minutes. A check on the peak stresses showed the checkout analysis was 2% off from the production analysis. Be aware that this percent difference can vary considerably from model to model.