Software and team will extend nonlinear simulation throughout infrastructure engineering
Bentley Systems has acquired Adina, a developer of finite element analysis (FEA) software used by civil, structural, and mechanical engineers on a variety of projects including buildings, bridges, stadiums, pressure vessels, dams, and tunnels.
According to Bentley, the company’s software offers ‘robustness’ across disciplines, materials, and simulation domains (structures, mechanical, fluids, thermal, electromagnetic, and multi-physics), to allow engineers to perform ‘comprehensive’ safety and performance studies where reliability and resilience are of critical importance.
Adina’s technology will also be applied within digital twins of existing infrastructure assets, through Bentley’s iTwin platform. According to Bentley, it can help simulate responses and vulnerabilities to stresses so extreme that nonlinear effects must be considered—caused (for instance) by seismic, wind, flood, pressure, thermal, collision, or blast forces.
Bentley says the software’s nonlinear simulation capabilities will complement its existing physical simulation applications — currently spanning STAAD, RAM, SACS, Moses, AutoPipe, Plaxis, Leap, RM, LARS, SPIDA, and PLS.
“Incorporating Adina and its creators is very exciting for all of our engineering simulation teams, as it will also be for existing and new users,” said Raoul Karp, vice president, engineering simulation at Bentley Systems.
“Dr. Bathe literally wrote the book on advancing finite element simulations, and the Adina System provides the reference for benchmarking all other disparate analysis approaches. We will now be able to extend nonlinear realism across all of our infrastructure digital twin simulation offerings.”
