What's new in 0.3

This is what changed in PartCraft 0.3, compared with 0.2, the version Try ran before. The five workspaces, sweeps and lofts, parameters, measuring, assembly tools, voxel stress studies, generative design and toolpaths were already in 0.2.

New

• Tetrahedral meshes for simulation. New studies mesh the part with 10-node quadratic tetrahedra whose nodes sit on the exact faces, so holes and fillets are curved instead of stepped. Choose Tetrahedral (accurate) or Voxel cubes (fast) under Mesh. Results add principal stresses, equivalent strain, mesh quality, an error estimate and Show mesh. See Check stress and deflection.
• Automatic refinement. Refine automatically (adaptive) solves, splits the elements with the largest estimated error and solves again, for static and steady thermal studies on tetrahedra.
• Heat, thermal stress and buckling. New study types Thermal (heat transfer) (steady or over time, with fixed temperatures, heat flux, power, convection and radiation to the surroundings) and Buckling (linear). A static study can take a thermal load, including Temperatures over time (transient run), which finds the worst moment. The library materials now carry thermal properties. See Heat, thermal stress and buckling.
• Fluid flow. The Flow (CFD) study type: laminar flow through the channels of a part or around it, with a cut plane, streamlines, surface pressure, pressure drop, drag and lift. See Simulate fluid flow.
• Turbulent flow, experimental. Flow model offers Turbulent (Spalart–Allmaras, experimental). It did not pass its accuracy checks and always shows a warning: read Known gaps below before you use it.
• Body tools. Set an extrude's or revolve's Operation to Intersect or New body, then use More › Combine, Move body, Scale body (also by X, Y and Z) and Path pattern. Linear and circular patterns can Copy bodies. See Combine, move and scale bodies.
• More reference geometry. Plane through an edge and a point, or square to an edge at its middle; Point at the middle of an edge, where an edge meets a face, or where three planes meet. See Reference planes, axes and points.
• Gordon surfaces. More › Gordon surface makes one surface through a network of profile and guide curves, or a solid with Close to a solid. See Surfaces through a curve network.
• Scripting (preview). The Script workspace runs CraftScript, a matrix language much like MATLAB, and Lua, with an editor, a console, saved variables, plots and fields in the view, and an analysis library you can read and copy. Scripts can be saved with the part. It is a preview: the language, the library and the way scripts are saved may still change. See Write and run scripts.
• View cube. Click a face, edge or corner of the cube at the top right of the 3D view to look from there, or drag it to turn the part. Corner indicator in Settings switches to an axis icon or nothing. See The view cube.
• Movable panels. Dock the side panels left, right or at the bottom, float them, or move them to a window of their own on a second screen. See Arrange the panels.

Improved

• Solver threads. Large voxel studies, buckling, stress over time and laminar flow can solve on several threads, with the same answers as on one. Solver threads in Settings sets how many. Threads work only on a page that is cross-origin isolated; elsewhere the setting says so and solves use one thread. See PartCraft settings.
• Simulation's material properties line, results table and probe show the new values (temperatures, heat flux, principal stresses).

Fixed

• An intermittent page error when the right panel redrew while a box in it had focus.
• Patch on a closed surface body: its seam edge no longer counts as a free edge.

Files and compatibility

• Part files stay at file version 3. Files from 0.2 open unchanged, and simulation studies saved in 0.2 keep their voxel mesh.
• A part that uses a 0.3 feature (body tools, Gordon surfaces), a thermal, buckling or flow study, or saved scripts does not open in 0.2, which says the file has something it does not read.
• Scripts open and save as .craft and .lua files; the Script workspace also reads STL, OBJ, CSV, JSON, NPY and HDF5 data files and saves variables as JSON, CSV or HDF5.

Known gaps

• Turbulent flow is experimental and not accurate enough for design numbers. In its checks, friction in flat channels came out 3 to 5 % high (with the wall layer resolved, the mean speed was within about 1 %); pipe friction came out 28 to 46 % too high; and the flow behind a backward-facing step reattached 28 to 54 % too soon, improving only slowly with smaller cells. Use it for patterns (where flow separates, recirculates or speeds up), not for numbers. The likely cause, the wall treatment on stepped walls, is recorded for the next attempt.
• Tetrahedral studies and heat transfer solve on one thread. Generative design is not threaded either.
• Automatic refinement covers static and steady thermal studies only; its error estimate is for the whole part, so a peak stress settles later than the estimate suggests.
• Thermal studies use constant material properties; buckling is linear (it overestimates the load a real part carries).
• Laminar flow is steady, isothermal and incompressible, with a uniform inlet; walls thinner than a cell leak.
• No Minkowski sums and no combining of surface bodies. Loft has no guide rails: use a Gordon surface closed to a solid instead. Gordon surfaces meet their neighbours without tangency (no G1 or G2).
• Scripting is a preview: no find and replace, autocompletion or breakpoints in the editor, one plot at a time, no complex numbers or struct arrays, and Lua cannot call the analysis library.
• What is not built yet