SimScale Autumn 2026: Engineering AI for All, Marc Solver Expansion, and Physics AI with Third-Party Data

SimScale has released its Autumn 2026 platform update, delivering a broad set of enhancements that lower the barrier to AI-assisted simulation, expand physics coverage, and tighten integration with third-party CAD and data ecosystems. The update spans Engineering AI, the Marc nonlinear solver, electromagnetics, and Physics AI model training.

Engineering AI Now Available to All Users

The headline change in this release is the democratization of SimScale's Engineering AI agent. Previously restricted to professional and enterprise accounts, the agent is now accessible to all users—including those on the free Community plan. This shift positions SimScale as one of the first cloud simulation platforms to offer agentic AI capabilities at no cost.

The agent has also gained new capabilities in this release:

• Result extraction: Users can query specific data points—maximum temperature, peak pressure, force resultants—through natural language without manually navigating post-processing panels.
• Mesh control: The agent can now create refinement regions, adjust mesh settings, and orchestrate full mesh independence studies across multiple analysis types.
• Parallel conversations: Multiple agent sessions can run concurrently within a single project, each independently managing its own simulation workflow.
• API and MCP access: The agent is now reachable via REST API and the Model Context Protocol (MCP), enabling agent-to-agent orchestration where external AI systems can delegate simulation tasks to SimScale.

A new free Onshape application accompanies this release, allowing engineers to interact with the SimScale agent directly within the Onshape CAD environment—querying geometry, setting boundary conditions, and launching simulations without leaving the design tool.

Marc Solver: Thermo-Mechanical and Advanced Material Support

The Marc nonlinear FEA solver, integrated into SimScale's cloud platform, receives substantial new physics capabilities in the Autumn 2026 update:

• Thermo-mechanical analysis: Full coupling of thermal and structural physics, including convection, radiation, and heat flux boundary conditions.
• Temperature-dependent materials: Support for linear-elastic, elasto-plastic, and hyper-elastic material models with temperature-dependent property tables.
• Bolt preload: Bolt preload boundary conditions are now available, enabling accurate fastener analysis in assembled structures.
• Local coordinate systems: Cartesian and cylindrical local coordinate systems can now be applied to boundary conditions and results, improving accuracy for curved or anisotropic geometries.

These additions make the cloud-hosted Marc solver competitive with on-premise configurations for a wider range of nonlinear structural problems.

Electromagnetics: Time-Transient Magnetic Simulation

The electromagnetics module gains two significant capabilities. Time-transient magnetic simulations now support prescribed translational motion with automatic air gap remeshing, enabling the analysis of linear actuators, solenoids, and relays under dynamic operating conditions. SPICE circuit coupling is also introduced, allowing users to upload circuit definitions and simulate the interaction between coil inductance and external circuit elements—capturing voltage drops and feedback effects that steady-state models cannot represent.

Physics AI: Training on Third-Party Mesh Data

A key workflow limitation for Physics AI—the requirement that training data originate from SimScale simulations—has been removed. The Autumn 2026 update allows Physics AI models to be trained on mesh data imported from external tools, with support for VTK, MED, and XDMF formats, as well as surface and volumetric mesh files. This enables engineering teams to leverage existing simulation libraries from Ansys, OpenFOAM, or other solvers to build surrogate models within SimScale, without re-running legacy cases on the cloud platform.

Workflow and CAD Improvements

The update includes targeted improvements to CAD preparation and post-processing. A new leak detection tool identifies the specific escape path when a fluid volume is unbounded, accelerating the diagnosis of geometry gaps in internal flow models. The "Delete Face > Cap" repair tool has been rebuilt to function on faulty CAD models, and a new "Expand Selection > Neighbor Faces" option simplifies region selection for complex assemblies.

On the visualization side, users can now assign custom colors to out-of-range values in result plots, and legends can be scaled to visible or selected parts—preventing extreme values in hidden components from distorting the color map.

Availability

The Autumn 2026 update is live on the SimScale platform. The Engineering AI agent is available immediately to all account tiers. Full release notes are available at simscale.com/blog/whats-new-simscale-autumn-2026.