Usage Guidelines

In general, ViewFlex is intended for flexible body generation for components whose size and/or geometry complexity do not necessitate creation of a model with large number of elements/nodes/degrees-of-freedom. For example, one should not apply ViewFlex to the creation of single flexible body representing an entire automobile body or an entire airplane fuselage. Models larger than a few hundred thousand nodes could be considered to be beyond the limits for what ViewFlex is intended.

A related topic to model size is how ViewFlex handles the memory size and buffer size when submitting the MNF creation job to the embedded Nastran MNF solver. ViewFlex automatically sets these parameters based on the model size as follows:

DOFs >= 400000                          Buffer size= 32769
400000>DOFs >= 100000            Buffer size=16385
100000>DOF's                              Buffer Size=8193

The memory size calculation is far more complex running between a minimum of 128MB and a maximum of the size of total RAM of the machine.

One should also consider that the disk space consumed by ViewFlex runs will be resident in the working directory of the Adams session from which it was launched.