Simulation Flex and the Autodesk Education Community

[hartogj]

To our students,

First I wanted to THANK YOU for using Autodesk sim during your coursework. We have a variety of users around the globe at all levels ranging from PhD students down to even the high school level. You all have been active in the forums, asking good questions, and doing some really interesting work.

For a while, Autodesk Simulation Flex was made available to the Autodesk Education Community. This included access to versions of Simulation Mechanical, Simulation CFD, and Robot Structural Analysis that could solve locally on your own machine or on the cloud. All of these products were bundled together in one installer and they required a login and internet access to use.

Starting in April 2015, the Education Community program was simplified to include only the traditional (ie. not cloud-enabled) versions of our FEA and CFD products. These products have the same analysis capabilities as what was available under Simulation Flex and work with the same file formats and data, however they do not solve in the cloud or require an ongoing internet connection to use. Cloud solving capabilities for simulation are now only available as commercial subscriptions.

This change may have disrupted some of you and we apologize for that – it was definitely not intended. Fortunately there is a path for you to continue with the traditional vesions. Students who previously had access to Simulation Flex can continue their project work by doing the following:

• Go to http://www.autodesk.com/education/free-software/all
• Select the individual product(s) you would like access to
  1. Autodesk Simulation Mechanical
  2. Autodesk CFD
  3. Autodesk Robot Structural Analysis
• Sign in with your account (and consent to the terms of the edu program)
• Download and install the product(s) of choice using the serial number and product key provided

Autodesk continues to expand its Education Community globally. Personally I think it’s an amazing program – I can only imagine how many ways I would have used it for projects when I was in engineering school. I’d encourage you to see everything that’s available there and take advantage of it for your studies however you can. It’s a great time to be a student.

Thanks

Jon