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Contacting LUSAS technical support - what you need to
know
LUSAS technical support is available from the LUSAS distributor that serves
your country or region. It is provided free to those clients with a current
support and maintenance agreement.
How do you contact us ?
We can be contacted by email, phone, or fax but we find email is the most effective method in supporting our clients.
For more information see Obtaining LUSAS technical support - how to contact
us
How can we help you ?
We
can advise you on finite elements and modelling issue, a few examples are:
- How to define your model geometry
- Which attribute types (such as loads and materials) to use
- How to choose the right elements
- The use of facilities that may be new to you
- How to interpret warning or error messages and advise on their remedy
- Suspected software errors that you may find
- The appropriate analysis type for an application e.g. nonlinear, dynamic,
fourier
- How to obtain solutions to analyses
- Information on forthcoming release facilities and proposed release dates
- Installation and system-based runtime problems
We anticipate and expect that our clients will contact us quickly. We
know that getting the method right as early as possible will benefit you. Remember that
you pay for our service and we are here to help you whether it be with "simple"
or "complex" queries.
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What kind of support you can expect ?
We aim to be as comprehensive in our response to you as possible. In
general, we give guidance and explanation as required but will not normally correct your
model for you - otherwise you will not know what to do next time. If the answer already
lies in the manuals we will guide you in the use of the manuals, and advise you where to
look, so that you can find the answer more quickly next time.
For each organisation we operate a "Named Contact" arrangement.
Under normal conditions, we agree to supply support
through a named person. We do ask therefore, wherever possible, that you contact your
named contact prior to calling the support desk. By using this person we hope to build a
"local" expertise for your institution that will benefit you. If you are unsure
who this person is, please contact us and we can
let you know.
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What do you need to provide us with ?
If it is modelling advice then we will need you to provide us with a
description of the structure/component to be analysed and the results that are required
from this analysis, including sketches – together with your specific queries. For
complex or difficult to describe problems, a simple diagram can be invaluable.
For problems encountered during an analysis we need to know the warning
or error messages exactly as they are printed in the .OUT file (for Solver) and the
LUSASM_*.ERR file (for Modeller), together with any numbers associated with system errors
and "traceback" information. Solver files and other files
associated with the model can be found in the following folder in the working
directory where the model is saved: ...\Associated Model Data\<Model
Name>\. For small to moderate size files it is probably
best to compress these files and send these to us at the same time. There is
a Support Tool available via the Help menu in Modeller which can be used (after saving your model) to quickly and conveniently create a compressed file
ready to send to us. We may ask for further
files later.
For geometric modelling problems we would need the MDL file and a clear
description of the difficulty you are encountering – with clear guidance on the steps
(menu clicks) that we would need to perform to try and simulate the problem.
Other information that we may need is
- The version of LUSAS being used (see
Help>About LUSAS Modeller)
- The machine specification being used
- A general description of the model e.g. Element types?, How many
elements?, Is it linear or nonlinear? What type of nonlinearity is involved? Is it static
or dynamic?
If you intend to contact us by phone, then try to be logged onto the
machine when calling or be close enough to the machine to try some of the suggestions of
the support engineer.
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Who you will be dealing with ?
The engineers in both our UK headquarters and our numerous
distributor
offices located around the world are highly experienced in the use of
LUSAS and are
regularly praised by our clients for their diligence and helpfulness. In the unlikely
event that your local distributor cannot resolve your problem, they will contact
the UK support team for help on your behalf.
The LUSAS technical support teams aim to help you to resolve your problems
quickly and thoroughly - most emails are responded to within a working day or often on the same day. In this
process we also endeavour to help you get the most out of our software and documentation,
also feeding back your ideas and comments on the software and documentation to product
development.
You will usually deal with the same engineer on any one particular
problem, as they will know the background to the query.
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What will happen if you encounter a software error ?
If we verify that you have encountered a software error, this will be
recorded and fixed and a new version sent to you as soon as possible. We will do our best
to suggest a workaround for you in the meantime
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What if you have a suggestion for improving LUSAS software ?
We welcome suggestions for improvements to both the software and
documentation - do let us know of any you can think of. Suggestions will be logged in our
database, prioritised and incorporated into a future release.
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What if you are unhappy with our service ?
Please tell us if you are not satisfied, we are always looking for ways to
improve our service.
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