Femap with NX Nastran vs old NEiNastran

I was faced with the same decision a couple of months back.

Siemens/NX offered a good financial incentive to make the switch away from Autodesk/Nei. Even with that offer, I opted to stay with Autodesk due to product familiarity, a perceived lack of support (for low seat-count customers) from Siemens, and the couple of composite-specific shortcomings you elude to.

So far, the latest Autodesk nastran solver/editor appears identical to the last Nei versions, just re-branded. In other words, no major head-aches yet. Reading between your lines, I share the same concerns of what the future holds in relation to Femap support of Autodesk nastran. Right now things are fine, but they haven't been separated long...

Did I make the correct decision? Only time will tell. Until then, I'm still drawing squares like a pro.

We also faced this decision. We had just purchased modules I & II on dongle six months before the announcement. I immediately made contact with the Femap/NX reseller we had looked at initially before signing with NEi. Great incentive to go with NX. But, Autodesk/NEi offered modules I thru V at no extra cost. The advanced non-linear solver paired with NX is actually not NX but a whole other solver...and it therefore costs a ton. That made the decision a fairly easy one. We did, however, pick up the Femap/NX reseller for our Femap support (Applied CAx). Highly recommend. With Autodesk, I have to say...quite concerned with the small pro user group on the Autodesk forum as compared to the Nastran-In-CAD product for Inventor. Time will tell but I would think stagnation is likely. That said, not an immediate concern.

I like FEMAP and NEi... tough one.

Applied CAX guys are good guys, and also Predictive Engineering's George Laird (owner) is a cool dude too, smart guy. I know him personally.

Stressing Stresslessly!

Thanks for your replies:

In the end I chose to go with Femap with NX Nastran instead of just staying with the existing Femap 11.1 and NEi Nastran. I don't know whether the deal made financial sense in my particular situation, but the feature that I gained was the ability to use the non-linear static solution which hasn't been available to me.

Now I'm learning about time steps, tolerance for convergence and number of iterations. And how much memory it really takes. I purchased another external hard drive to store files and free up memory on my computer for the scratch file.

Tom

Alright then, new adventures...

Stressing Stresslessly!