MSC Software's Patran to be used at Shipyards Worldwide for Strength Assessment

MSC Software Corporation today announced that CSR Software LLC, a joint venture company created by Lloyd's Register of London (LR) and American Bureau of Shipping of Houston, Texas (ABS), has successfully implemented a Patran-based module to be used at shipyards worldwide in the strength assessment of large double hull oil tankers and bulk carriers.

The custom user interface built with MSC Software's pre & post processor Patran, developed for CSR Software by DHL Consulting of Londonderry, New Hampshire, is written completely in Patran Command Language (PCL), which comprises 22 customized forms and some 25,000 lines of PCL code to support CSR modeling verification and results evaluation.

"Providing the core infrastructure of analytical methods for certification of vessels and vehicles has been fundamental throughout MSC's entire history," said Dominic Gallello, President and CEO of MSC Software. "We are delighted that these Classification Societies have decided to host their methods on our platform with the expert help of CSR."

"We have Patran users all over the world working in the field of naval architecture and finite element analysis of large ships at sea," said Daron H. Libby, owner of DHL Consulting. "When the International Association of Classification Societies (IACS) introduced Common Structural Rules (CSR), analysis software suppliers like Lloyd's Register (LR) and American Bureau of Shipping (ABS) had to react quickly to provide engineers with tools to assess their designs against these new standards. The Patran PCL language was the perfect customization tool to provide the analysts with powerful graphics and data manipulation of large models consisting of up to half a million nodes."

Mr. Libby went on to say, "Many PCL coding obstacles were confronted using innovative PCL programming solutions in order to meet the needs of the ship analyst. The PCL language has really proven to be a robust programming language that can do most anything when it comes to reading, writing, and manipulation of finite element data and putting up most any display an analyst needs to do his or her job. It really is an amazing customization programming tool.