Siemens Digital Industries Software has announced the 2025 release of Solid Edge software, bringing new capabilities to its product development software. The latest release also introduces Solid Edge X software, delivering a cloud-enabled secure Software as a Service (SaaS) environment, enhanced with new AI-enabled tools to help users work smarter.

Gear drives are fundamental in most processing operations, connecting the prime mover to the driven equipment and ensuring that the system has enough torque to effectively move product. Correctly specifying and selecting the proper gear drives for critical applications leads to reliability, greater uptime and profitability.

For this paper, the digital twin refers to a digital asset that exists alongside the physical asset during its operational life, providing insight into and feedback on the physical asset’s performance and health. Thus, the focus is on the DTI, with the potential to aggregate data into a DTA for the gearbox design being considered, and within the DTE set up by Hexagon.

In respect of the physical asset across its life, nothing is more important about its performance than its ability to function, i.e., reliability, and for CAE, nothing is of greater importance than to be able to predict the reliability of a product being designed. Thus, for this study, whilst gearbox noise, efficiency, and thermal behavior may be of interest, the primary interest is fatigue and reliability.