On Tuesday I took part in a webinar (everything is online now) about products of company Beta CAE. I’ve never heard about them, but they are saying that it exists for three decades. Looks like they have made a large number of products for since the beginning, from messanger to file manager and FEM solver.
Webinar itself was focused generally on pre- (ANSA) and postprocessors (META). Both of them were developed for automotive industry and all they examples were from this field.
Mesher in ANSA looks rather powerful and could generate elements in dynamic mode. Though it’s hard to say if it could handle real geometry made by real designers witn all that mathimatical edges and other imperfections. Neither Patran, nor Hypermesh could made a mesh with a good quallity of parts with flaws.
META contains a lot of features for car industry and could be hardly applied in aerospace
In general, I think their move from narrow area to general application needs a lot of efforts from both their side and company that would give them chance. For now their sollutions looks rather raw for aerospace, where FEM itself rarely uses without hand analysis substantiation. And for loads development Beta CAE tools lack of elements IDs control. From the other side even Patran could bring errors in Nastran input file and using third-side software needs a lot of testing and verifications to be fully trusted.