Author: ANGEL SHARP

Michael Finneran
For release: February 24, 199
(804) 864-8150
RELEASE NO. 95-12

LANGLEY TECH TRANSFER WILL HELP FIRMS IMPROVE PRODUCT DESIGN

	A Los Angeles-based firm has signed an agreement with Langley Research Center to use NASA-developed technology that will help industries worldwide speed up and improve the design of a wide range of products, from cars to coffeemakers.

	Langley signed the cooperative agreement with The MacNeal-Schwendler Corp. (MSC), a world leader in computer software for simulating the performance of structural and mechanical systems. 

	Under the 3-year agreement, MacNeal-Schwendler will receive Langley developed technology for modeling structural systems. The company plans to program that capability and incorporate it into its most popular product, a structural analysis computer program called MSC/NASTRAN. With this new capability, MacNeal-Schwendler customers will be able to create computer models easier and faster, and their computer simulations will be more accurate.

	Many industries design products by simulating their performance on a computer before building costly prototype models. 

	"For example, during the design of a new car, a computer model of the vehicle could be crashed into a computer model of a barrier, and the results studied to see if passengers in a real automobile would have been injured," said Dr. W. Jefferson Stroud, of Langley’s Computational Structures Branch, Structures Division, which is where the technology was developed. "The designer could use that information, together with results from many other computer simulations, to arrive at a design that meets cost and performance targets"

	"This is a good marriage between technology and what both NASA and MSC want to get out of the project,"Stroud added. "We’ll be able to move this important technological development into the general mainstream of design engineering."

	The type of software sold by MacNeal-Schwendler is used by industries around the world, including shipbuilders, automakers, aerospace firms, consumer-products companies, and many more. The transfer of technology to non-aerospace companies is part of a new effort at Langley to help develop U.S. competitiveness in a global market.

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