Paris, France, March 1, 2007 – Once again ESI Group (ESIN FR0004110310) has chosen the GIFA to present its recent releases in casting solutions and meet its customers. For almost 2 decades, GIFA has been recognized as the most important casting trade fair in the world. ESI Group casting simulation solutions have been showed at GIFA since the 1989 edition. From 12 to 16 June 2007, you will have the opportunity to get a comprehensive overview of the rapid developments in the area of casting process simulation. ESI Group’s casting team will present the new ProCAST and QuikCAST solutions during meetings dedicated to your needs. The ESI Group booth will be represented by ESI Group’s multilingual casting team coming from Eastern and Western Europe, North and South America, China, Japan, Korea and India.

The users of ESI Group casting solutions benefit from the multi-facetted range of products and solutions (Welding, Crash Impact and Safety, Stamping, Vibro-Acoustic, Composites and Plastics, Advanced CFD…). A major thrust during this GIFA edition will be on the link (inter-relationships) between cast part properties and their usage in final assemblies under real conditions. For that purpose ESI Group has developed a new open collaborative engineering environment allowing process customization and automation.

The ProCAST solution includes automatic mesh generation, thermal analysis with radiation effects, flow analysis for mould filling, fully coupled thermal, flow and stress analysis, and advanced metallurgical options. This software provides state-of-the-art simulation capabilities to the casting industry allowing complex processes to be simulated and provides foundries with the capability to test more mould designs in less time. In 2006, the ProCAST solution received the European Technology Leadership of the Year Award from Frost & Sullivan.

QuikCAST, the fast and efficient solution for casting process evaluation is a streamlined and user-friendly casting simulation tool which provides a complete industrial solution to foundries and delivers realistic predictions at each step of the casting process. Based on robust solvers and efficient self-correction features, this technology yields comprehensive and realistic results with high mesh independence.

“Almost 20 years ago we had to explain the purpose of our work and even CAD software’s were in their infancy. Ten years later, towards the end of the 20^th century, simulation was well understood but user requirements shifted the focus towards validating the numerical results with experimental work Today the main challenges are found in the integration of simulation results within the global product life cycle and the capability to rapidly predict better results with additional specific casting functionalities in a friendly user environment. In fact this is exactly what ESI Group casting solutions propose because of its fast developments, strategic acquisitions and rapid expansion all over the world. As the casting simulation veterans of the GIFA foundry trade fair we will be honoured to welcome you in our booth in 2007 to show our recent developments and to explain our strategy” says Dr Marco Gremaud, ESI Casting Solutions Product Manager.

To obtain information to prepare your visit to the ESI Group’s booth Hall 15 Booth G14 please contact either your ESI Group’s representative or visit www.esi-group.com.

About ESI Group

ESI Group is a world-leading supplier, and a pioneer of digital simulation software for prototyping and manufacturing processes that take into account the physics of materials. ESI Group has developed an extensive suite of coherent, industry oriented applications to realistically simulate a product’s behavior during testing, to fine-tune manufacturing processes in accordance with desired product performance, and evaluate the environment’s impact on product performance. ESI Group’s products, which have a proven track record in manufacturing and have been combined in multi-trade value chains, represent a unique collaborative and open virtual engineering solution known as the Virtual Try-Out Space (VTOS), enabling virtual prototypes to be improved in a continuous and collaborative manner. This integrated protocol allows all the company’s solutions to work with each other and with applications developed by independent software vendors. By significantly reducing costs and development lead times and enabling product/process synergies, VTOS solutions offer major competitive advantage by progressively eliminating the need for physical prototypes during product development. The company generated sales of €62.2m in 2005, employs over 500 high-level specialists worldwide covering more than 30 countries. ESI Group is listed in Eurolist compartment C of Euronext Paris. For further information, visit www.esi-group.com.

ESI Group - Press Relations                          

Nathalie David-Franc                                                    

nathalie.david-franc@esi-group.com                              

Tél. : + 33 (0)1 41 73 58 35