1.10  Release notes for SDT and FEMLink 7.3

1.10.1  Key features

The major revision 7.2 was only made available as a beta version, with the stable version skipped due COVID related constraints.

SDT 7.3 is the only version fully compatible with MATLAB 9.4 (2018b) to 9.8 (2020a) mostly due to changes in the representation of complex numbers in MATLAB. Key changes of this release are

• a major rewrite of the SDT handle object with major impact on GUI performance and compatibility with expect future changes in MATLAB GUI. sdth.urn provides a general mechanism for Uniform Resource Names which can now be used to designate and select many GUI or model components.
• the introduction of the +vhandle package of classes to upgrade earlier functionality implemented in v_handle. In particular, vhandle.matrix provides a user readable access point to C libraries linked into the mkl_utils mex file corresponding to matrix like operators, but with possible parallel or initialization/repeated call (called inspector/executor by INTEL) optimization. This has provided speedup factors between 2 and 100 for a range of high performance time computations using both implicit or explicit time schemes. The SDT/nlsim token may be required for calls to the nl_solve diagNewmark solver (non-linear time domain transients in modal coordinates) and to the nl_solve expNewmark (explicit time solver). The vhandle.chandle object is used to provide init/call separation for non matrix like objects.
• on the experimental modal analysis side, the handling of parametric tests (dependence on temperature, loading, amplitude, ...)

For femlink the main changes were related to GUI and superelement import. For MATLAB compatibility see section 1.10.2.

1.10.2  Notes by MATLAB release

• MATLAB 8.0 (2012b) to 9.8 (2020a). SDT & FEMLink 7.2 are developed for these versions of MATLAB and are fully compatible with them.
• For best mex performance, using MATLAB 9.4 (2018b) and higher is advised.
• For efficient FEM rendering, it is strongly advised to use HG2 : Matlab 8.4, R2014b and later.
• MATLAB 7.14 (2012a) to 8.3 (2014a) SDT & FEMLink 7.0 are being phased out but can be used for a number of operations. Equations are not being shown correctly in the HTML documentation.
• Earlier MATLAB releases are no longer supported.
• MATLAB 8.5 has known bugs in the handling of colorbar.