Case Study: Northrop Grumman Mission Systems cuts hex meshing workflow time in half with MSC Apex from Hexagon

MSC Apex makes hexahedral meshes practical and cuts the entire workflow time in half

Northrop Grumman Mission Systems, a specialist in military radar and sensor systems for aerospace, needed to overcome the inefficiency of creating a hexahedral mesh for structural analysis. Their legacy tools made the process of preparing geometry and generating a high-quality hex mesh, which is more accurate than tetrahedral, prohibitively time-consuming. This challenge prevented them from utilizing the superior mesh type within their project schedules.

By implementing Hexagon's MSC Apex software, the team gained access to integrated geometry defeaturing and advanced generative meshing tools. This new solution streamlined the entire pre-processing workflow, cutting the time required to create a run-ready solver deck for MSC Nastran in half. As a result, Hexagon helped Northrop Grumman reduce their workflow time from approximately 16 hours to just 7 hours, a savings of 9 hours per analysis, making the benefits of hexahedral mesh attainable.

Northrop Grumman