The development of domestic independent CAE simulation software is at a critical turning point. As the high-end manufacturing industry demands increasingly higher simulation accuracy, a self-controlled and reliable simulation software foundation has become ever more important.
Industry Landscape
For a long time, the domestic CAE market has been dominated by foreign commercial software such as ANSYS, Abaqus, and Nastran. These tools are powerful, but they present the following issues:
- High cost — Commercial license fees are prohibitively expensive, making them unaffordable for many small and medium-sized enterprises
- Technology restrictions — Some advanced features are restricted for Chinese users
- Difficult customization — Closed-source software struggles to meet specific industry needs
Advantages of Independent Simulation Software
Full Autonomy and Control
From underlying algorithms to upper-level interfaces, the entire stack is developed in-house, free from external dependencies.
Flexible Customization
Deep customization can be carried out according to the specific needs of domestic manufacturing, such as:
- Constitutive models for specific materials
- Industry-standard verification workflows
- Data interoperability with domestic CAD software
Cost Optimization
Compared to foreign commercial software, independent simulation software offers clear advantages in both procurement and maintenance costs.
Technical Challenges
Developing a truly usable independent finite element solver requires overcoming the following hurdles:
- Large-scale sparse matrix solving
- Nonlinear iteration convergence
- Multiphysics coupling algorithms
- High-performance parallel computing
Future Outlook
With increasing national policy support for industrial software independence and the continuous accumulation of domestic CAE talent, independent simulation software will enter a period of rapid development over the next 5–10 years.
The ExCAE team has a decade of code accumulation and is dedicated to providing the domestic manufacturing industry with a full-stack independent simulation solution spanning from solvers to management platforms.