For your Structural Analyses you want Precise and Reliable Data processing.

Structural Analysis is about supplying and returning high precision data using sophisticated mathematics behind the scenes.

The Hart of ProCetus is its Calculation Engine, a highly optimized and precise piece of software engineering. The Engine is written in bare naked "C" and all numeric data is computed and stored in 80-Bits Floating Point memory fields. This is the best you can get with Personal Computers today. "C" is currently the programming language with the best performance even for scientific applications. This is a guarantee for both speed and precision.

As for the Interface, this is 100% Windows Native. It is developed with State-of-the-art 100% Object Oriented "C++" Programming tools (OOP).

For ProCetus, nothing less than the best was good enough. Many developers of technical applications still propose Windows adapted software originally developed under DOS using FORTRAN Compilers. FORTRAN, for many decades undoubtedly the best, today the OOP technology has brought an extra dimension to programming. It has allowed developers to increase their efficiency and speed by an order of magnitude. OOP combined with "C" is now regarded as the ultimate.

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For your Structural Analyses you need CAE (Engineering), not CAD (Design).

As said before, Structural Analysis is about acquiring, processing and storing highly precise and reliable data. Trying to combine CAE with CAD methodology is like getting into a bad marriage. Eminent Structural Engineers have pointed this out and agree.

Even the very best of CAD packages currently available get sometimes confused and run into a hang-up state. For Design this is a minor problem and bares no consequences. For Structural Analyses on the contrary, it can be a hazard to the integrity of your data. ProCetus wont let you down and we have yet to come across a situation where it hung-up. Surely, you will sometimes find that the Engine aborts on a runtime error. That happens when it tries to divide by 0 (zero) and this is always due to an error in the input data.

Our viewpoint is to use CAD applications solely dedicated to Design and CAE applications solely dedicated to Engineering. For that reason, it was decided to manage the acquisition and restitution of data with a Numeric Table Interface using 80-Bits Floating Point precision. Another advantage besides precision and reliability is the fact that the application is a lot cheaper to develop without all the glamour and glitter of a sophisticated graphics interface for data input. It may not look as nice, but it is a lot more reliable and efficient.

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You want your Structural Analysis Application to run fast.

For the reasons explained in the first paragraph you can rest assured that ProCetus will be very competitive in this area. Programming and software engineering will in many cases make a significant difference to an application that processes massive amounts of numeric data.

ProCetus will run on all machines, old and new, and on all Windows versions from Win95 onwards. Of course, the speed and runtimes of ProCetus will largely depend on the capabilities of your computer and the quality of its components. Note that execution speed not only depends on the frequency generator of the processor. The frequency of the motherboard itself is also important and must be capable of supporting the processor's architecture. Reducing the need for frequent disk swapping has a major positive impact on the performance of programs like ProCetus that process vast amounts of data. Hence, the more RAM and Cache Memory available, the better the performance. Equally important are the access times to your Hard Disk and its speed (> 7000 rpm is no luxury).

Using modern recent machines ProCetus was ran on projects with several hundreds of nodes and elements, and with more than 20 single and combined load cases. The Calculation Engine typically cleared such a task in 3, max. 5 seconds. When looking at the decomposed times it was found that the larger portion of the runtimes were consumed by disk access, not data processing.

ProCetus was once ran on an older machine (350 MHz, 128 Mega Byte RAM) to handle a project with 6,000 Nodes, 10,000 Elements, 128 single Load Cases and 128 Combined Load Cases. The job was cleared in a total of 40 minutes, 4 minutes to do the calculations and the rest to handle disk access. Note that for a project this size, ProCetus requires a 600 Mega Byte dynamic allocated memory, resulting in quite a lot of swapping to disk. This means that for Mega Size Projects you must make sure that the swap file on your Hard Disk is sufficiently large. Note also that the total amount of disk space required to store the results files generated by this project is approximately 1130 Mega Bytes.

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You want your Structural Analysis Application to be powerful and flexible.

Example:
ProCetus Editions, all alike, come standard with a comprehensive set of Section Libraries and a wide range of predefined Elements for both Structural and Piping. At the same time you can quite easily buildup your own library of Materials from the data sheets of your suppliers. The "Material.dbf" file resulting from this can be copied into every new Project Directory for reuse.

If you are merely interested in quick analyses of rather small Structural Projects, without the need to monitor or control every data item, you simply follow the standard input and modeling procedures and make use of the Speed Buttons and Dialog Boxes with their default values. It's easy and straight forward and it is all that will ever be required to handle the vast majority of Structural Analysis Projects.

If on the contrary you are working in an educational or academic environment and wish to experiment with structural data, we have good news for you. ProCetus is an open book and you have access to about every single data item for editing. This level of freedom allows you to study the effect that certain parameters may have on the results. The same goes for all default settings that the Calculation Engine needs for processing and analysis. Too much to enumerate on this page; just know that you are at the helm of a ship with all controls at hand. Be aware however, that unless you know exactly what you are doing, experimenting with sensitive structural data may be hazardous in real life situations. The results ProCetus will produce can only be as good as the data you feed into it!

You may be in a team that handles Mega Size Projects with hundreds or even thousands of Nodes and Elements in which lots of different recurring structural modules need to be assembled. The bad news is that this would be possible but time consuming using ProCetus numeric Input Data Tables and Files. The good news is that there is a very easy and very efficient alternative to handle this. Indeed, to our knowledge, nearly every engineer is reasonably familiar with the use of his favorite Spreadsheet Software Application (e.g.: Excel from Microsoft or QuatroPro from WordPerfect). ProCetus has a set of functions that allow you to Import and Export selected Input and Results Tables from and to "Comma Delimited ANSI Text Files (CSV files)". Every Spreadsheet Software can handle this type of files. We are confident you get the drift here: by enabling you to transfer data tables to and from Spreadsheet Software you have virtually unlimited possibilities for modeli ng Mega Size Projects in the most efficient and powerful manner. You first export the Input Data Table to your favorite Spreadsheet Software. There you have virtually unlimited possibilities to generate very large Input Tables quickly and easily. Then you import the Table back into ProCetus and proceed with the job.

There is another major advantage to this approach: You can steel Results Tables from ProCetus to quite easily perform any exotic Code Check that Project Specifications may require you to do.

Is there a price to pay for all this freedom and flexibility? Well…, to a certain extend there is indeed. Because of the way ProCetus is set up, you will need to obey a few rules during the modeling and data input phase. Don't worry, these rules are clearly explained in the online help. They are rational, logic and based on common sense. Trying to bypass these rules programmatically and consequently being forced to check and solve all possible input errors an unqualified user may make, would have resulted in far less freedom and flexibility. It inevitably would have tied the hands of the qualified engineer. Being engineers ourselves, we have too much respect for the work of a qualified structural engineer and therefore believe it is improper to impose restrictions.

>> Download ProCetus now and try it out for Free.

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