Abstract
Keywords: CAD, FEA, ARX
The paper presents a way to extend the basic capabilities offered by Mechanical Desktop, using the ARX (Autocad Runtime Extension) set of library. This development uses the native graphic entities (such as NURBS surfaces, for geometric modeling, and other basic entities, for mesh generation and postprocessing) and enhances their behavior with thermal analysis capabilities. This implementation can solve a thermal analysis problem for a direct problem, when the unknown is the thermal distribution along the nodes (as any other commercial FEA software) and also a reverse problem, when the nodal temperatures are already obtained from an infrared measurement but the unknown is the load vector, so we can obtain the thermal sources involved the analysis. The settlements introduced by ISO 10303 STEP and other related standards are used to combine these aspects of a CAD approach.