PTC has revealed details of the latest Creo release, Creo 7.0, which will be available on April 14. There are four key areas of focus in the upcoming release: generative design, simulation driven design, multibody design, and productivity enhancements. These were highlighted in a livestream presentation announcing Creo 7.0 from Paul Sagar, PTC’s VP of Product Management. “Creo 7.0 delivers the next generation of design innovation with revolutionary new capabilities… [that] allow engineers to build higher quality products faster than ever before,” Sagar said.

Generative Design

While generative design technology has been available in other CAD platforms for a couple of years, Creo 7.0 users will now have access to the algorithmic design assistant. Generative design is still going through growing pains, but its allure is the promise of quickly homing in on lightweight and manufacturable designs. “Jacobs [Engineering] expects that using Generative Design will shorten design time by 20% and produce parts which are incredibly lightweight, resulting in significant fuel savings,” said senior Jacobs engineer Jesse Craft in a pull quote for Sagar’s presentation. According to Sagar, Jacobs Engineering is using PTC’s generative design to help design NASA’s next generation spacesuit. Generative design will be fully integrated into the Creo 7.0 design environment, where users can specify their design space, constraints and loads, materials, and manufacturing requirements. From what we could see in the livestream, Creo’s take on generative design seems quite similar to that in Fusion 360 from Autodesk, one of the early advocates of generative design. Some features of Creo generative design, such as the ability to run multiple studies simultaneously in the cloud, won’t be available until Creo 7.0.2. Initially, the software will only support structural optimizations, but Sagar says thermal and modal optimizations will come in a later build. At time of writing, we have been unable to confirm exactly how users will access generative design in Creo 7.0. According to Sagar, “Creo 7.0 is just the tip of the iceberg” for generative design.

Simulation Driven Design

In 2018, PTC partnered with simulation company ANSYS to bring Discovery Live, ANSYS’s real-time simulation technology, directly into Creo 6. For Creo 7.0, PTC has continued down the track of simulation-driven design. “What product development teams really need is a simulation tool that’s so fast, so responsive, so simple to use that it can literally keep up with the design engineers every step of the way,” Sagar proclaimed. Creo 7 introduces transient thermal studies into Creo Simulation Live, whereas previous releases were limited to steady-state thermal analysis. Users can set initial temperature parameters and toggle between transient and steady-state. In addition, Creo 7.0 introduces the ability to add probes as parameters for real-time simulation, which can be used as variables to calculate the optimal design of a system. Read more at ENGINEERING.com