Which Solver? FFEPlus vs. Direct Sparse – PART 2 [VIDEO]

Some time ago, I had written a blog post comparing two solvers in SolidWorks Simulations, FFEPlus and Direct Sparse. When comparing the speed of the solvers, the FFEPlus solver was beyond doubt the faster of the two solvers when handling large Degrees of Freedom.

The question may now arise, why use the Direct Sparse Solver. The simplest answer is accuracy. Since the Direct Sparse solver does not make any approximations for solution, it solves the problem directly and there are no associated computational errors. The Direct Sparse Solver becomes the solver of choice in problems where the software has other iterative processes going on as well and the error can accumulate over these iterations. (Contact Problems, Large Displacement Analysis, Circular Symmetry etc.)

This video demonstrates a simple test to compare the accuracy of the two solvers.