Once the probabilistic response is quantified, the results can be used to support risk-informed decisions regarding reliability for safety critical and one-of-a-kind systems, and to maintain a level of quality while reducing manufacturing costs for larger quantity products.
NESSUS is interfaced to all major commercial finite element programs and includes capabilities for analyzing computationally intensive real-world problems.
It has been successfully applied to a diverse range of problems in aerospace, gas turbine engines, biomechanics, pipelines, defense, weaponry and infrastructure.
In 1999, SwRI was contracted by Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) to adapt NESSUS for application to extremely large and complex weapon reliability problems in support of its Stockpile Stewardship program.
The end result of these two large programs was a completely redesigned software tool — NESSUS Version 8.2 — that includes a graphical user interface, three-dimensional probability contouring and results visualization, capabilities for performing advanced design of experiments and sensitivity analysis, a probabilistic input database, and interfaces to many new third-party codes such as ABAQUS, ANSYS, LS-DYNA, MSC.NASTRAN and ParaDyn.