Rapid Analysis of Complex Assemblies with Altair SimSolid

This presentation discusses the rise of intelligent design technologies used throughout industry to rapidly assess and optimize product performance before physical prototypes. The session includes a brief hands-on demonstration of some of the latest, easy-to-use simulation technologies that are empowering designers and design engineers around the world to capitalize on the digital design revolution. Speakers: Dr. Royston Jones, CTO, Altair Ken Welch, Senior VP Inspire Design and Manufacturing Products, Altair Duration: 20 minutes

This workshop demonstrates how a simulation-driven design approach to product development can have a drastic impact on the performance, design time, and profitability of a new product. Using a belt sander tool as a demonstration model, our presenters show how Altair’s design and simulation technologies can conduct a concept design analysis and optimization of the sander external housing to improve stiffness and reduce weight. They go on to show how we can simulate the manufacturing process itself by looking at filling, packing, cooling and warpage of the plastic housing; before concluding with a series of stress analysis and validation studies such as a virtual drop test, 3-point bending simulation and even a study of the effect of the heat transfer of the electric motor. This is a valuable session to see how simulation technologies can be used throughout the design process, adding value and reducing development time at each stage. Speakers: Ujwal Patnaik, Global Business Development Manager, Altair Chris Sambell, Application Engineer, Altair Duration: 60 minutes

On an international stage, confidence in your design is the bridge to success. Engineering principles have been cultivated to satisfy design requirements and help analyze more and more accurately. For Team Albatross, as analysis of aircraft design holds crucial, Altair strikes to be the first choice. This integrated system houses major products such as Simlab, SImSolid, and Hypermesh which have helped us introduce new design validation analyses for the team. With Altair, we achieved greater computational power even on the simplest of laptop configurations. Altair Hypermesh has allowed dealing with complex geometries that come with our design with utmost ease, giving precise results. Powerful products of Altair such as SimSolid help us perform a plethora of analyses in a short span of time and completely eliminate the barrier of computing limitations. Such unique analysis tools of Altair have enabled Team Albatross to secure ranks in the top 3 for the past 2 years on an international level, and this year, Team Albatross also stood 1st nationwide. Seeing this, it is certain that with what Altair has to offer, Team Albatross is more than ready to advance in technological standards and bring laurels this year too!

Sustainable designs last longer. David Yáñez from Vortex Bladeless, a Spanish start-up, shares his vision of the technology, the strategies used for the integration of the different physical phenomena involved in the simulation-driven design, and the development of their resonating structures having minimal parts susceptible to wear by friction. The simulation results from CFD, with fluid-structure interaction, and electromagnetic field simulation are compared with experimental wind tunnel results and from in-service environments.

Special-purpose machine design needs quick and flexible responses to individual customer requirements while maintaining a tight focus on quality and safety requirements. With limited time and personnel, the traditional FEM could not provide sufficient confidence for design decisions. Hear how ATNA Industry Solutions has turned simulation into a design tool. Speakers: Thomas Müller, Co-Founder, Commercial Manager, ATNA Industrial Solutions Hagen Möller, Design Engineer, ATNA Industrial Solutions Duration: 12 minutes

As the demand for understanding part performance increases, design engineers are being asked to understand stresses and displacements early in the design cycle. Traditionally, when designing larger complex systems, the design process is linear, with CAE validation done after the design is complete. SimSolid’s revolutionary technology allows engineers to test multiple designs and what-if scenarios with a low learning curve while enabling a quicker, more integrated product development process.

Inspire’s new parametric modeling allows you to capture the evolution of your model’s shape by showing the linear sequence in which the geometry was created. You can roll the model backward or forward, as well as group, delete, insert, suppress, or edit entities in the History Browser. Inspire also features a new and improved sketching interface and several new sketching tools. See how you can use these new tools to seamlessly add, remove, and parameterize features in your model and then use the Variables table to quickly make design updates and see how they affect performance is in seconds to minutes.

At Altair, we see a future where seemingly disparate systems work seamlessly together to help businesses succeed. Where pin-point accuracy and speed mean the difference between winning and losing. The world of data science is intersecting with high-performance cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and IoT, unlocking limitless potential and enabling enterprises of all sizes to compete on a global scale while creating a more sustainable future.

Safety and reliability are paramount objectives of the aero-engine development work. Comprehensive dynamic simulation and testing ensure safe and reliable products. However, new design architectures with increasing demand for power density need to be developed in even shorter time scales. Robust structural dynamics are one key objective that needs to be addressed very early in the concept design. Today’s analysis tools need to make accurate dynamic predictions at the system level which takes a long time due to very large design iterations and robustness assessments. An approach to resolve this dilemma by combining Altair SimSolid with frequency-based coupling and data science thinking is presented. The presentation by Carsten Buchholz, Project Engineer for Hybrid Electric Flight Demonstrator at Rolls-Royce, aired at Future.AI in June 2021, and is almost 13 minutes long. Ready to see how your company can drive innovation with AI-powered design? Contact our solutions experts today. View all Future.AI 2021 Presentations

Altair CTO James Dagg presents an overview of the journey Altair took to develop the leading modeling and visualization technologies we have today, and provides a look at what’s coming next to help you reduce your product delivery time. James Dagg has been at Altair for more than 30 years and is a visionary behind Altair’s software strategy and development activities. He has also led the development of Altair’s concept design technologies and oversaw the development of Altair’s CAE software suite for more than a decade.

Ross Atherton is a Structural Systems Design Engineer in the Rolls-Royce Civil Aerospace Future Programmes Engineering department. After a period of supporting Rolls-Royce’s growing large engine fleet, Ross turned to future products; and has since led a small team designing, assessing, and enhancing the conceptual product architecture of future market opportunities. Ross’ presentation will go into detail on how Rolls-Royce have deployed the Altair Hyperworks toolset to enhance the structural efficiency of their UltraFan engine, covering: rapid model and mesh creation; new insights from structural optimisation and robust design; integrated post-processing; and the resulting acceleration of the engineering design iteration cycle.

Don-Bur are designer and manufacturers of commercial vehicle bodies such as truck trailers and develop custom trailers for many famous retailers. Their products are often highly customized to individual client requirements, ensuring speed and accuracy of their design tools is key. In this presentation Richard Owen will talk us through why they adopted SimSolid technology and show a quick hand on demo on a typical structure whilst analyzing SimSolid.

Speaker: Richard Owens, Marketing Manager, Don-Bur

Duration: 13 minutes

Rescroft are an automotive seating specialist in the UK. In this presentation João will talk about their use of SimSolid in their design process along with other tools that’s available within the Altair concept engineering suite. Speaker: João Dias, Head Of Engineering, Rescroft Duration: 22 minutes

Faraone are specialist in transparent architectures such as canapes, balustrades, staircases, glass partitions and other glass structures. Gabrielle will take us through their design teams who uses SimSolid and Altair Inspire on their structures. Speaker: Gabriele Romagnoli, Head of Structural Engineering, Faraone Duration: 18 minutes

In this presentation Carlos from NOV shares his experience with SimSolid and shows us how the technology is allowing him to very quickly assess structural performance of some very large CAD models including walkways used in Oil fields. Speaker: Carlos Omar Ramirez, PE Engineering Manager, NOV Duration: 18 minutes

Jonathon Heath, (Former) Lead Mechanical Design Engineer Brompton Bicycle This presentation will show how Brompton adopted simulation in their design process and moved away from their traditional CAD embedded simulation packages with hands on demo of SimSolid.

Alexandre Marangoni, Senior CAE Engineer Whirlpool This presentation will show how Whirlpool will take us through how they validated SimSolid against FEA solvers that implemented the tool in their concept design processes.

Mauricio Pacheco, Design Team Manager and Christian Herrera, Design Engineer General Motors This presentation will give us an insight into how SimSoild is being used in their Engineering centre in Mexico.

Andrew Blows, Principal Technical Specialist Jaguar Land Rover In this Keynote presentation from Andrew Blows, will give us his perspective on Why Jaguar Land Rover using SimSolid over traditional FEA, when & where to use SimSolid and some examples of where SimSolid has been used and how the results compare against traditional FEA

Girish Kalyan, Product Manager - Altair SimSolid Altair In this presentation Girish will introduce SimSolid and a demo to showcase simulation at the speed of design.

James R. Scapa brings more than 35 years of engineering experience to his dual role of chairman and CEO of Altair, a title he has held since the company's inception in 1985. Through Scapa's leadership, the company is now a global technology company that provides software and cloud solutions in the areas of product development, high performance computing (HPC) and data analytics. Today, the company employs over 3,000 engineers, scientists and creatives with more than 86 offices in 25 countries. With more than 11,000 customers globally, Altair software enables customers to enhance product performance, compress development time and reduce costs. Scapa earned a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from Columbia University and a master of business administration degree from University of Michigan.

Simulation has its greatest impact when done early and often in the design process. Now, SimSolid is reimagining how simulation-driven design is performed.

James R. Scapa brings more than 35 years of engineering experience to his dual role of chairman and CEO of Altair, a title he has held since the company's inception in 1985.

Altair Inspire has rapidly advanced from a topology optimization tool for designers to a design environment spanning industrial design, structural simulation and optimization, motion analysis and manufacturing simulation.

This presentation discusses advancements of the range and quality of products in the last few years at Faraone, thanks to the adoption of both Altair Inspire and SimSolid. SimSolid is a great tool that allows Faraone to study and refine the design of complex structures and a variety of different products, not just glass balustrades. In less than half an hour, it makes it possible to analyze and verify a three-story glass staircase, directly from the 3D CAD file, a simulation that would normally requires about half a day. Additionally, Moreover the original CAD drawing does not need simplification, SimSolid® works directly from the 3D CAD file, allowing fewer issues, and a better, final solution.

Presentation by Avishai Warszawski, Mechanical Designer at IAI, Israel Aerospace Industries at the ATCx in Israel, Netanya on October 30, 2019. The goal of this project is to design a lightweight and stiff support bracket for delicate coaxes which are attached to an electronic unit. The machining design of this bracket, although very light in weight, did not provide the required stiffness and was also very expensive to manufacture. The best approach for design was only realized after the AM team was requested to find a solution. Topology optimization with Altair tools was used to define the best shape that provides the best solution. Finally, the bracket was printed in an SLM machine from AlSi10Mg. In the near future it will be qualified by dynamic tests in accordance with the defined environmental loads.

Presentation by Sergi Chanukaev, Country Managing Director, Altair Israel, at the ATCx in Israel, Netanya on October 30, 2019.

Renault presented on their use of Altair SimSolid at the HyperWorks 2019 Roadshow in France. They showed a reduction in lead time from weeks to hours with results accuracy within 5% of their standard processes.

Dr. Nuno Lourenco, Senior Manager Body Engineering at Jaguar Land Rover presents at the 2019 UK Altair Technology Conference. The increasing complexity of mechanical systems across multiple industries poses challenges to simulation activities, where solvers, pre- and post- processors often fail to capture all control variables and noise factors affecting a system and can lead ultimately to a gradual loss of credibility to simulation tools and engineers. A hypothesis is presented that the answer is to tackle that system complexity through simplicity, in an approach that is more akin to software development rather than traditional mechanical system design.

Dr Royston Jones, Managing Director of Altair UK delivers and opening presentation for the country's 11th Altair Technology Conference 2019.

Jon Heath, Lead Mechanical Engineer at Brompton Bicycle presents at the UK ATC 2019. The Brompton bicycle has been engineered over many years using very much traditional engineering development methods. Introducing FEA tools and methods into the development process has allowed Brompton to reduce development time and improve early stage design robustness.

This presentation details how the company has implemented the Altair Inspire, SimSolid and HyperWorks suites into its development process, enabling its design team to find problems quickly and correct them before prototyping.

Seen here presenting at the UK Altair Technology Conference 2019, James R. Scapa brings more than 35 years of engineering experience to his dual role of Chairman and CEO of Altair Engineering, Inc., a title he has held since the company’s inception. In 1985, Mr. Scapa and two partners founded a small consulting activity in the new field of computer-aided-engineering. Today, the company employs over 2,000 employees with more than 82 offices throughout 25 countries.

Through Mr. Scapa’s leadership, the company is now a leading global provider of simulation technology and engineering services that empower client innovation and decision-making. With over 5,000 clients, Altair serves the automotive, aerospace, government and defense, heavy equipment industry sectors as well as the consumer products, shipbuilding, energy, electronics, life sciences, and architecture engineering and construction markets. Prior to establishing Altair, Scapa served as an engineering consultant to the automotive industry, beginning his career with Ford Motor Company in 1978. Scapa holds a Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from Columbia University and a Master of Business Administration from the University of Michigan.

This presentation illustrates how Altair’s latest simulation product updates can facilitate and accelerate customers’ product design cycles by addressing specific tasks for both designers and engineers, from part to system level structural design, spanning from concept- to detailed development stages.

Within the context of an excavation scenario, we will show a range of solutions with a focus on the following:
- optimization of an excavator arm with regards to structural performance and fatigue life assessment under realistic loading conditions,
- rapid, early loadcase evaluation and improvement of structural robustness by performing detailed design exploration of a truck trailer assembly,
- improvement of Roll-Over-Protective Structure test results of an excavator cabin by applying Altair’s innovative C123 optimization,

A technical overview of aforementioned solutions is followed by relevant software demonstrations of updated model build & exploration workflows within the new HyperWorks user interface, integrated Inspire solutions for Motion & Structural analysis, along with automatic CAD redesign & CAD parametric optimization processes.

Presented at the ATCx Heavy Equipment in May 2021.

Speaker: Alexander Gnech, Technical Manager, Altair

Duration: 20 minutes