CFD Simulation - Not Just for Experts

With faster computers comes new complexities that, if understood, can be mastered to yield significant application performance and cost improvements. In this breakout session, we will investigate how the Azure HBv3 offering, with increased memory bandwidth and L3 cache, can drastically reduce time to solution for AcuSolve at scale. We will cover some benchmarks and show how they perform on Azure at various scale points. This data will enable AcuSolve users to reduce time to solution so they can dedicate more time to improving their product.

Together with cloud providers and our other HPC partners, Intel is driving the performance and flexibility that are critical to running advanced HPC workloads in the cloud. We collaborate across our HPC ecosystem to help cloud providers offer accelerated, secure, and agile environments using our latest technologies, such as Intel® Xeon® processors. As cloud customers continue exploring new possibilities and applications for HPC, Intel is dedicated to facilitating their success. Intel works with HPC partners from various industries to enable forward-thinking cloud use cases such as bursting, AI, and advanced analytics. Learn how Intel collaborates with Public and Private Cloud Service Providers to optimize HPC workloads for fast, cost-effective execution on Intel-based Cloud Instances.

In modern Electric Vehicles, body panel design plays a huge role in thermal management for the Li-Ion battery and powertrain performance. Early-stage aerodynamic and thermal prediction is necessary for surface optimization of vehicle exterior. Well defined and controlled flow phenomena need to be achieved around the vehicle during A- surface development phase, to improve the ride performance and handling of the vehicle on the road In this phase, Altair CFD Thermal solver AcuSolve drastically reduced the time consumed for analysis

The aerodynamics design of high-performance bikes plays a significant role in reducing the overall drag, increase in speed, and improving the range efficiency. To improve and sustain the performance of the EV, it is necessary to explore various factors such as aerodynamically streamlining the vehicle design, optimise frontal area, and cooling electronic components as well.

Dactem (a DAM group company), developer of specialist test, measurement and assembly solutions for the aerospace industries, presents an overview of the optimization of a thrust balance used for accurate measurements in electrical thruster qualification endurance testing. The presentation will provide details on how a Multiphysics simulation approach was used to find the optimum design taking mechanical, thermal and electromagnetic performance into account. Speakers: Emmanuel Pouleau, CEO, Dactem (a DAM Group company) Pierre Moutet, Engineer, Dactem (a DAM Group company) Duration: 15 minutes

Electrification is everywhere! It brings energy efficiency into systems and also helps add new smart functionalities to products. The electric motor is a key element of such systems, converting electricity into mechanical power. It is multiphysics by nature. Electric machine engineers need to take into account various constraints from the early stage of the design, looking at electromechanical performance, as well as respecting thermal and NVH constraints. Simulations need to integrate these multiple physics and also coupling effects. Dedicated tools and streamlined multiphysics workflows are developed in order to reduce complexity and speed up the design. Speakers: Limin Huang, Electromechanical Engineer, Altair Samia Saaidi, Senior Technical Specialist - Electromechanical Solutions, 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

Altair® EDEM™ is a discrete element method solver that enables users to accurately simulate particulate processes. When coupled with Altair Computational Fluid Dynamics (AcuSolve), these two solutions enable the simulation and analysis of two-phase solid-fluid systems. These simulation tools are widely used in various industries and in academia to deepen the understanding of different unit operations, such as mixers, coaters, fluidized beds and pneumatic conveyors. The unique and novel solutions that Altair offers address the challenges when using DEM and coupled CFD-DEM methods.

The usability of a headset is largely determined by a comfortable fit and its resistance to everyday use. Learn from Alice Lin, Manager of Mechanics at GN Audio R&D how she introduced FEM simulation capabilities at Jabra. The presentation shows how product design benefits from structural analysis, design for comfort, and drop test simulation. A future extension of simulation capabilities intends to address more areas and improve the simulation-driven design process efficiency. Speaker: Alice Lin, Manager of Mechanics, GN Audio Duration: 22 minutes Click the AD icon to select alternative audio translations - French, German, Portuguese and Spanish.

AAM has been providing mechanical drivelines to automotive customers for more than 25 years. As the automobile transitions to electrification, so too must the driveline. AAM has developed a suite of innovative, lightweight, compact and cost-optimized electric drive units and electric beam axles to meet the growing global technology demand as electric vehicles continue to expand over the next decade. Engineering simulation, optimization and validation tools were significant enablers to increase the validation confidence and reduce the time to market for these new products.

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.

Dust is a serious problem for industries that handle and process bulk materials, causing deteriorating ambient air quality, human health concerns, while increases housekeeping labor costs to meet safe levels for health and fire risks. Learn from Dr. Andrew Grima about the technologies employed to develop a successful solution to minimize dust by using calibrated discrete element modeling (DEM) and new dust extraction technology.

For the past three decades, Altair’s optimization solutions have driven the innovative, lightweight, and structurally efficient designs of many products you see and use every day. The intense focus on additive manufacturing in recent years have given a boost to topology optimization and generative design, providing more freedom to explore alternatives. Today, we keep on innovating the technology, looking at including multiple physics, like thermal, electromagnetics, and fluid flow to drive design. Altair AcuSolve – coupled with Altair Optistruct – enables engineers to find the optimum shape by simply defining inlets, outlets, and the allowable space in which the solver can work. AcuSolve’s gradient-based topology optimization method will quickly and efficiently find the path of least resistance to deliver fluid flows with minimal effort.

To design today’s tightly packaged electronic systems it is essential to create a thermal analysis model of the PCB within its enclosure. Learn how Altair SimLab provides robust and repeatable workflows for fast, accurate, and consistent analysis, even for occasional users allowing them to confidently identify and correct potential design issues earlier in development with accurate thermal analysis that doesn’t require advanced CFD knowledge.

The Digital Twin concept is broadly applicable to all Altair customer base wanting to develop better products faster. We will explain how to maximize the value you can get from the Altair Platform for Digital Twins. We will illustrate how this solution helps diverse engineering teams develop better, more complex products faster by avoiding work in silos. This will include proven uses cases for the convergence of simulation and data.

The increasing complexity of machines requires active management and evaluation of potential product failures and simulation of physically accurate conditions during development. Achieved through multiphysics simulation, Altair SimLab can simulate a wide range of interacting physical models including fluid-structure interaction (FSI) and thermomechanical simulation. By helping with complex design problems, simplified modeling workflows give a deeper understanding of phenomena and root causes of unwanted behavior.

This presentation shows how advanced simulation technology can provide a cost effective way to minimizing the risk breaching noise regulations. Often the issue is only found out in a prototype testing scenario, bench test results can give misleading information as acoustic character of a rotating component will change in an installed condition. Altair CFD brings a solution to the market for installed fan acoustics by directly calculating the convective field, this virtual method can significantly reduce risk of failure leading to development cost savings and mitigation of timeline overshoot.

Presented at the ATCx Heavy Equipment in May 2021.

Speaker: Andy Fine, Vice President CFD Solutions, EMEA, Altair

Duration: 15 minutes

Brett Chouinard, President and COO of Altair discusses Development challenges in Industrial machinery and illustrates how Altair's scalable simulation solutions provide the environment for simulation-driven innovation and how machine learning expands the capabilities furter.

Felix Koerfer, Technical Consultant at Altair, gives a Demo Sessions on Altair Simulation Solutions for faster evaluation of real-world machines, explaining how accurate structural assessment with real loading conditions allows assessment of global stress and deformations, evaluation of bolt forces, and how accuracy & deformation of linear bearings cna be achieved.

Martin Kemp, Regional Manager at Altair, Dr. Denis Cumming, a Senior Lecturer at The University of Sheffield, John Milios, CEO at Sendyne, Dr. Gregory Offer, Reader at Imperial College London and finally Professor Jun Xu, Director of Vehicle Energy & Safety Laboratory at The University of North Carolina, present - Developing Predictive Electro Thermal Cell Models for Pack Level Deployment. This presentation will focus on the simulation of the battery cell to represent its complex thermal and mechanical behaviour. The thermal behaviour requires the simulation of the electric behaviour within the cell which leads to the generation of heat. Managing the thermal behaviour is fundamental to the long term health of the battery. The talk provides an overview of the technologies used to simulate battery behaviour, commencing with the understanding of the battery structure including the simulation of electrode manufacture. Both electrochemical and equivalent circuit models will be discussed with the advantages and disadvantages of both methods presented. Finally, machine learning technology is used to create an intelligent cell model which retains accuracy whilst delivering computational efficiency which can be used in Part 2.

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.

Stephen White, Technical Support Manager, introduces Altair SimLab, a process-oriented, feature-based finite element modeling software that allows you to quickly and accurately simulate behaviour of complex assemblies. SimLab covers multiple physics including structural, thermal and fluid dynamics which can be easily setup and automated, helping to drastically reduce the time you spend creating finite element models and interpreting results.

BMW Motorrad is the motorcycle division of BMW, a German multinational company manufacturing luxury automobiles and motorcycles. With the first motorcycle manufactured in 1923, their current product line includes a variety of shaft, chain, and belt-driven models designed for off-road, dual-purpose, and sports powered by a variety of engines ranging from a single cylinder, various two cylinder (parallel twin, flat twin, boxer etc.), four cylinders inline and six-cylinder inline ones. BMW Motorrad faced a challenge with their model build processes, needing to move previously outsourced crankshaft modeling work in-house while also reducing lead time. Through a semi-automated modeling process based on Altair SimLab, BMW Motorrad developed scripts which reduced FE model generation time down 80%, from 2 weeks of manual work to just half a day. Ruediger Ott, HyperWorks Business Development at Altair, presents a use case from BMW Motorcycles who found that they could significantly reduce the model build time of their powertrain assemblies with SimLab, making use of the automation capabilities to minimize manually effort and refinement.

Dr Venkat Perumal, Senior Principle Engineer at Stryker Global Technology Center discusses the adoption of simulation in Medical Device industry and how it helps shorten the overall product development cycle time & cost. While adoption of simulation has the ability to reduce and time, physics-based models need rigorous verification, validation and uncertainty quantification. This talk will include examples, where physics-based simulation results lent insight of the product performance, materials modeling and structure-properties correlation. The role of industry-academia-private & public partnership in driving the change from 100% ‘make & break’ to ‘simulation driven product development’ including regulatory submission will be discussed. The video is 12 minutes long and was presented at the Altair Technology Conference 2020.

A welcome address to Altair's ATCx CFD virtual event hosted in 2020, presented by Andy Fine, VP CFD Solutions EMEA at Altair.

CFD for Oiling and Thermal Management of Drivetrain Components, presented by Dr. Miloš Stanić, Product Manager at Altair during the ATCx CFD 2020.

Presented at the ATCx CFD 2020, Fast and Accurate Solutions to Optimize CFD Performance by Stephen Cosgrove, VP CFD Solutions Americas at Altair.

Presented as part of the ATCx CFD 2020. Empowering Aerodynamic Design Exploration – Volkswagen Group Research Case Study by Dr. Bastian Schnepf, Technical Manager CFD Solutions at Altair.

Presented at the ATCx CFD 2020. A New & Revolutionary Way to Collect Energy from Wind by David Yáñez, Co-Founder of Vortex Bladeless.

Workshop 3: General Purpose CFD presented live at the ATCx CFD 2020 virtual event.

Recorded at the ATCx CFD 2020 virtual event, this is a Q&A with Torbjörn Larsson, Former Head of CFD for Ferrari F1. With previous roles at BMW F1, General Motors and Saab Military Aircraft, Torbjörn has 30 years of industrial experience in fluid mechanics and CFD. Listen to the questions our audience posed to Torbjörn in this 30 minute session.

Learn how Altair’s flexible and efficient CFD solvers pave the way for simulation-based design in the field of Computational Fluid Dynamics.

More and more engineers need to solve problems that can span multiple physics including structural, thermal, electromagnetics, and fluid dynamics.

The world is full of bulk and granular materials. From ores being mined, soil being excavated, rocks being conveyed, or powders being processed - over 70% of all industrial processes involve the handling or processing of these challenging materials.

Simulation-driven design powered by topology optimization was created by OptiStruct over two decades ago. Its success has changed the CAE/CAD industry as today all vendors have embraced this trend.

Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) has long been regarded as an "expert" tool that requires specialized skill sets to apply properly.

This presentation introduces an application of a unique, highly automatic, multi-physics design strategy for E-motors, based on a current program at Mercedes-AMG GmbH. The strategy considers essential development requirements including electromagnetics and thermal requirements, NVH, stress and durability. It accommodates for DOE, multi-objective optimization and design exploration methods to be used to explore and find feasible motor designs. The presentation will show how the strategy adds efficiency to the E-motor development process and how it impacts the total costs of development.

Presenter: Christian Kehrer, Altair [on behalf of Oliver Höfert, Simulation Engineer at Kampmann]

The increasing virtualization of engineering methods is inevitable. This also holds true for the design of systems that take care for the thermal well-being of humans, e.g. in buildings. If it comes to simulation of so-called HVAC (heating, ventilation, air conditioning) systems, very often high fidelity approaches like CFD are connected to it. In contrary, this contribution illustrates a 1D modeling approach of a heat exchanger in use of Altair Activate. The presentation explains the implementation of the NTU (Number of Transfer Units) method in a system simulation environment. This includes a short description of the approach itself as well as its current limits. Based on the implementation of a single cell, differing network configurations for the evaluation of use cases of varying complexity will be shown.

Ed Wettlaufer, Technical Manager Mechatronics Group, Altair [on behalf of NAVAIR]

Government solicitations for proposals, or RFPs, for aircraft and airborne systems require preliminary designs with enough fidelity to accurately predict performance, in order to prove the design's ability to meet the Governments performance requirements. Modern high-performance computing provides the leverage to execute previously expensive analyses in areas such as computational fluid dynamics. The results of these high order analyses can be used to populate parameters in 1D systems models which can be easily coupled to medium order models from other disciplines. These capabilities allow the design engineer to rapidly iterate to levels of model maturity and accuracy not achievable years ago, resulting in high levels of confidence in the designs performance predictions in unprecedented time. Moving forward, Altair engineers will employ Multiphysics and co-simulation to execute the Engineering and Manufacturing Development phase (EMD) for one subsystem of the preliminary design developed in the afore mentioned pre-acquisition phase.

Altair SimLab: The New Platform for Multiphysics Gunaseelan Krishnasamy, Vice President, SimLab Development, Altair