Read time: 5-8 Minutes

Target Audience: CAE & Simulation Engineers, Mechanical & Structural Design Engineers, Engineering Managers & R&D Leaders, Industrial Manufacturers, Digital Engineering Teams

For decades, simulation has been an essential part of engineering validation—but often not an integral part of everyday design. Traditional finite element analysis (FEA) can demand substantial effort before the solver even begins: CAD geometry must be simplified, features defeatured, contacts idealized, and a suitable mesh created and refined. For large assemblies, this preparation can become a bottleneck in both engineering productivity and product development.

SimSolid takes a fundamentally different approach: eliminate the mesh altogether.

This meshless technology is more than a usability improvement. It changes the economics of simulation by reducing model-preparation effort, accelerating design iterations, and making advanced structural analysis accessible earlier in the product-development process.

Meshless by Design—not “Mesh Less”

Traditional FEA depends heavily on the quality and density of its finite-element mesh. Engineers must balance element size, accuracy, computational cost, and convergence. Complex CAD geometry can make this particularly challenging, while assemblies introduce additional complications around compatible meshes and connections.

SimSolid instead works directly with fully featured CAD geometry and does not require a traditional analysis mesh. Its computational foundation is based on extensions to the theory of external approximations, where arbitrary geometrical shapes can be used as finite elements and approximation functions are decoupled from element geometry.

The result is a fundamentally different simulation workflow: the manufacturing-ready CAD model becomes the simulation model. Geometry simplification and meshing—the two tasks frequently described as time-consuming, expertise-intensive and error-prone in conventional FEA—are eliminated.

The SimSolid Advantage: More Simulation, Less Engineering Overhead

The real value of SimSolid goes beyond eliminating the mesh. Its technology changes who can perform simulation, how quickly designs can be evaluated, and how early engineering teams can make data-driven decisions.

• Put simulation in the hands of design engineers: SimSolid is designed to be easy to learn and use, without requiring users to become FEA specialists or understand the underlying mathematics. This allows design engineers to evaluate structural performance directly during the design process, reducing dependence on specialized CAE resources for every iteration.
• Accelerate product development: With solutions typically delivered in seconds to minutes, engineers can evaluate multiple design scenarios rapidly rather than waiting hours or days for traditional simulation workflows. This makes simulation practical as an everyday design activity—not simply a final validation step.
• Analyze complex assemblies directly: SimSolid can work with large, complex assemblies containing components of different sizes and geometries, while supporting realistic connections such as bolts, welds, adhesives, frictional contacts and more. This significantly reduces the effort traditionally associated with assembly preparation.
• Work directly with CAD geometry: There is no need to create a separate simplified analysis model or spend hours preparing geometry for meshing. SimSolid supports mainstream CAD systems and common neutral formats, allowing engineers to move from design geometry to simulation with far fewer intermediate steps.
• Reduce iteration time: Because there is no laborious remeshing when solution detail needs to be increased, engineers can quickly modify designs, rerun analyses and compare alternatives. This creates a much tighter feedback loop between CAD and engineering analysis.
• Handle imperfect real-world geometry: SimSolid is tolerant of geometric imperfections and assembly conditions such as gaps, overlapping geometry and ragged contact surfaces—conditions that can create significant challenges in conventional FEA workflows.
• Scale without demanding specialized hardware: SimSolid can run on desktop-class computers without requiring a high-end GPU, while HPC and cloud resources can be leveraged when larger models demand additional computing capacity.

The result is a different engineering workflow: design, simulate, learn, modify and repeat—at the speed of design.

How Xitadel Can Help

Adopting a faster simulation workflow is not simply about adding another software tool. It is about understanding where simulation can make the biggest impact across your product development process.

Xitadel can help you evaluate, implement and maximize the value of SimSolid within your existing engineering environment. Whether you want to reduce CAE bottlenecks, empower design engineers with simulation, accelerate product iterations, or tackle complex assemblies more efficiently, we can help identify the right approach for your team.

If your engineers are spending more time preparing models than learning from them, it may be time to rethink your simulation workflow.

Get in touch with Xitadel to explore how SimSolid can help your team simulate faster, iterate earlier and develop better products.