Autodesk Inventor vs. Simcenter STAR-CCM+

Autodesk Inventor is a great tool for students and faculty for engineering areas that don't require great precision or development of more thorough scientific results. Is you are conducting research, or deal with very intricate and complex systems I would recommend a more robust platform that complies more to industry standards.

Incentivized

The applications that I have been using it with in terms of flow and energy and temperature distributions and coupled solvers, segregated solvers, these kind of areas if you need that, those kind of solvers, it's very good. It's very robust. Maybe on the combustion side, it could improve, especially if you have these kind of tabulated solvers that you want to use, not the detailed chemistry, then it becomes very difficult to get some results from it. And do you trust the results or not? That's always the question on that kind of application, something that I could think of really fast.

Incentivized

• The program is very good at simplicity. Each of the buttons, menus, and options has an explanation of exactly what the feature does, and even a more advanced description if you desire to learn more about what each one does.
• Autodesk Inventor is a very fast program. Everything renders extremely quickly and there are no delays when examining a 3D model, part, or assembly. This is especially useful when giving a presentation about a product or design, and you need to be able to show a concept to an audience in real time.
• The software has an extremely accurate simulation feature that lets users do stress analysis on a 3D model. It can calculate precisely where the stress concentrations are going to be in a particular model and even give you an accurate depiction of where the part could likely fracture and/or fracture during loading.

Incentivized

• If you get your knobs well in the case setup, It is reasonably accurate to compare with any test data.
• It is good for repetitive workflows where you can greatly benefit from automation in the code.
• Single Integrated Platform can save your ass to move back and forth between multiple codes.

Incentivized

• most if it still runs on a single core. Please fix this
• Crashes. In our experience, too many crashes. We have high end machines and crashes are way too common.
• Autosave. I think it is simply unacceptable that Autodesk Inventor combines common crashes with no autosave functionality. We feel this pain all the time.

Incentivized

• Implementing physics like Cox-Voinov model
• Mesh related stability issues
• Chemical & plasma physics
• Integration with other products from Siemens (similar level as we have with Abacus)
• Speed up the lagrangian solver
• Improved guidence on uFluidics & evaporation models
• Interoperability (HEEDS, AMEsim, System Modelling Workbench but also with non siemens products and open source codes required for LBM, DSMC, PIC, DFT...

Inventor continues to meet our enterprise needs. I don't see a need to change unless we change our business model significantly.

Incentivized

It’s easy and very good for mechanical design

Incentivized

Great single window GUI

Incentivized

I think the support for Autodesk Inventor is very good. The staff at our reseller were very knowledgable and able to walk us through problems pretty easily. The training we received was very good also. I will say that there were a couple of times we reached out to support with a question or challenge we had, and the support agent was not able to resolve our problem, and after touching base back we found out that there was not a solution for the problems we were experiencing. One of them was just how Inventor represents colors inconsistently at times, all things being equal. Another was that Inventor would not let decals on parts transcend to the assembly level. they just would not show up.

Incentivized

Our designated support engineers do a proper job. On the outdated Help file and training material there is a lot to gain

I got the training during college, so mostly i learned on my own

Incentivized

It is super easy when it comes to implementing it.

Incentivized

When it comes to solid modeling, the bad choices died out years ago. So we looked at the total ecosystem and chose Autodesk Inventor because of the integration with Nastran, HSM (machining), Autodesk CFD, MoldFlow, and AutoCAD. This means our legacy data (2D) is still a valid part of our design methodologies going forward, and we have the full breadth of engineering tools at our disposal. Other solutions in this space have similar offerings but not nearly as potent of a portfolio in total. It's worth saying that we do not consider Inventor in the same space as CATIA or NX, but that the entire Autodesk portfolio (e.g. Alias, PowerMill, etc) includes a total toolset that exceeds these industry giants.

Incentivized

• Working on a project designed with Inventor provides a modular design platform that can quickly be configured or changed as required. This allows for the quick turn around time for the design and revision of drawings.
• We've used Inventor over the years (since 2013) and the updates and newly released versions of Inventor do not require re-training or restrict use.
• Autodesk follows an intuitive approach and users or designers who have worked on other design platforms like SolidWorks can transition easily to Inventor.

Incentivized

• Time saved in creating a inhouse code, tens and tens of hours.
• Time saved in experimental setup, tens of hours.
• Does add some time in testing to confirm star is doing what you think it's doing, but an overall net gain in productivity.