Release highlights:
New Contact Analysis Capabilities for Ease of Use and Accuracy.
The industry leading contact analysis capabilities in Marc have been improved further in this release.

- The tube-in-tube or beam-in-tube behavior encountered in many engineering applications in oil and gas, automotive, aerospace and biomedical industries can be modeled and analyzed with ease. Marc 2013 facilitates automatic expansion of pipe and any general cross-section beam elements to capture their behavior during contact with beams or other rigid and deformable elements.
- Interference fit, commonly encountered in assemblies, is also made much easier and more flexible, saving time and improving accuracy.
- The expansion of segment-to-segment contact support to multiphysics provides smoother contours, and improved accuracy in several applications in automotive, aerospace, energy, and manufacturing applications.

New Material Models Improve Accuracy
With the rapid growth in the usage of elastomers, it is important to understand their complete nonlinear behavior and damage accumulation.

- The new Bergstrom-Boyce model may be used to accurately simulate the time-dependent large strain viscoelastic behavior of hyperelastic materials. It may be combined with damage models to represent the permanent set of the material that is often observed in elastomers, which improves accuracy and helps users create better designs of elastomeric products like tires, seals, and elastomeric bearings.

Elastomers are heavily used in products that experience dynamic excitations due to their damping characteristics.

- Viscoelastic material properties in a harmonic analysis may be used to compute the stiffness and damping properties as a function of frequency, and is supported for linear elastic and hyperelastic material models available in Marc. Thermo-rheologically-simple behavior of these materials can also be specified to include temperature dependence of storage and loss moduli.

Advanced Failure Analysis Capabilities
A new Continuum Damage Model simulates the three stages of damage evolution, namely void generation, growth and coalescence. It expands the current damage modeling capability using Gurson-Tvergaard-Needleman formulation, and uses fewer physical parameters to represent damage evolution. This capability helps engineers to more accurately identify damage accumulation and possible failure in manufacturing processes like sheet forming and stamping operations.

Several enhancements in crack propagation studies include general crack propagation in 3-D solids, and better locally refined, automatic global remeshing capability to provide finer mesh at crack tip. Easy placement of crack tip surfaces in an arbitrary location, without concerning about splitting element faces reduces modeling effort and enables users to perform crack initiation and propagation studies faster, and more accurately.

New Solution Schemes for Higher Productivity
Marc's manufacturing process analysis capabilities have been further enhanced in this release with improved support for multistage forming.

- The new capability supports simulation of chained analysis for multi-stage forming processes in a very easy manner. Users can move the internal variables from one simulation to the next easily and update the contact tools/dies. Prior results can also be re-used so that the state of the model from the previous analysis is retained, without the need for large restart files, leading to more flexibility and reduced computer resources requirements.
- New multi-physics capability enables coupling of structural analysis with a magnetodynamic-thermal analysis. Using this methodology, precision manufacturing engineers can determine the parameters to control the heat of a sheet, jet blade, or other work-piece induced by induction heating.