AVEVA Releases Finite Element Analysis Interface for Shipbuilders

CAMBRIDGE, England, January 14 - AVEVA (LSE:AVV) announces the release of AVEVA Hull Finite Element
Modeller, a powerful new addition to the AVEVA Marine portfolio which
accelerates and simplifies the stress analysis of ship structures.

Ship designers rely on the use of Finite Element Analysis (FEA) to ensure
that hull structures comply with rigorous strength criteria and achieve low
levels of vibration for maximum passenger comfort. FEA is a computational
technique for stress and vibration analysis which entails the idealisation of
a physical structure as a mesh of a very large number of small elements.

Although the analysis itself is a relatively rapid process, translating a
vessel's hull structure into an idealised mesh in such a way as to achieve
accurate and reliable analysis has long been a laborious and time-consuming
process, which is normally repeated several times as the design evolves.
Finally, it is common to include a detailed FEA in an approval submission to
a classification society such as Lloyds Register or Bureau Veritas, in order
to better demonstrate a vessel design's structural soundness.

Shipbuilding has now become such a rapid process that the FEA cycle
itself can be the critical-path activity. Timescale pressures frequently
require a shipyard to begin steel cutting before final design approval has
been received, so a design change requirement from the classification society
can result in costly construction rework.

AVEVA Hull Finite Element Modeller has been developed in collaboration
with leading shipbuilders to overcome these problems. It applies
sophisticated, rule-based methods to ensure the rapid idealisation of
structures created in AVEVA Hull Structural Design, to faithfully represent
the essential characteristics of the physical design while ensuring accurate
and computationally-efficient analysis in third-party FEA programs.

Commenting on this important new release, Stephane Neuveglise, AVEVA's
Product Marketing Manager for AVEVA Marine, said: 'This product meets a
widespread demand in the shipbuilding industry, which must meet stringent
international regulations while faced with severe competitive pressure to
achieve ever lower costs and shorter delivery times.

'AVEVA engineers have worked closely with our collaboration partners to
develop an extremely powerful and easy-to-use application which is already
meeting or exceeding expectations on a number of different projects. Users
have consistently reported achieving 30-50% reduction in direct man-hours for
FEA, as well as valuable gains in design quality, timescale and avoidance of
construction rework.'

AVEVA Hull Finite Element Modeller is available for immediate deployment
in an AVEVA Marine environment and may be used effectively on all types of
commercial or naval vessel designs, or other floating structures.

About AVEVA Hull Finite Element Modeller

It is used with AVEVA Hull Structural Design and exports idealised meshes
either in ANSYS(R) APDL format, or in neutral XML format for other
third-party FEA programs. It combines rule-based 'intelligent' idealisation
with extensively user-configurable parameters for the rapid creation of
high-quality meshes. Hull structures may be idealised in their entirety or as
selected blocks, with coarse or fine meshes, enabling rapid analysis in the
early design stages and more detailed analysis of highly-stressed local areas
as the design progresses.

More information about Hull Finite Element Modeller and other AVEVA
Marine solutions may be found at www.aveva.com/marine.

About AVEVA

AVEVA is a leading supplier of engineering and design software to the
marine industry; 85% of the world's most productive shipbuilders employ AVEVA
solutions. For more information about AVEVA, please visit
www.aveva.com/ednotes.

    For further information, please contact:

    Alison Patey
    Marketing Communications Manager
    AVEVA Corporate
    Tel: +44-1223-556653
    alison.patey@aveva.com

For further information, please contact: Alison Patey, Marketing Communications Manager, AVEVA Corporate, Tel: +44-1223-556653, alison.patey at aveva.com