Driving Design from Concept to Manufacturing with Inspire

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!

The filling and solidification process of molten metals are very complex in nature and the phenomenon of these process lead to casting defects.​  The defects like shrinkage cavity, porosity, cold shut, and sink, etc. should be identified, and at the same time, there should be a solution to overcome that prior to going for manufacturing.​  There should be an alternate approach for addressing these issues before manufacturing and an alternate approach should be fast, reliable, and user-friendly.​  The shown casting part made of SS304 and having Porosity defects inside it, which weaken the part structurally and creating problems at the functional area.​So, with the help of Inspire Cast identified porosity as well as overcome it up to a useable extent.​

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.

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.

Product engineers are under constant pressure to reduce costs, improve quality and increase the throughput of manufacturing processes. Applying a simulation-driven design for manufacturing (SDfM) approach to product development can help understanding the product manufacturability early in the design cycle, while considering various design alternatives and choosing the best performing, manufacturable design up front. After a brief introduction of the metal forming process, the presentation will explore a typical use case of a sheet metal part - subject to static and dynamic loading – showing how simulation can be very effective in reducing cost for parts redesign and dies modifications, while providing engineers with valuable insights on the manufacturing process and product performance.

The goal for any design, structural and manufacturing simulation is to predict and fix defects early in the product development. This panel will discuss how design and simulation tools are helping engineers to be efficient. Experts will share their thoughts on current and future trends in manufacturing, focusing on how designs evolve using manufacturing simulations.  

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.

Formula Student is an international motorsport engineering competition where teams from around the world design, build and then compete a formula style racing car. In this presentation, Team Bath Racing discusses how they make use of Altair Inspire for topology optimization and how it enables rapid design iterations.

Presented at the 2nd Altair Academic Outreach Event in June 2021

Speaker: Conor Smith, Outboard Suspension Designer, Team Bath Racing
Duration: 18 minutes

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

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.

Daniel Jauss, Application Engineer CAE, gives a Demo Sessions on Altair Simulation Solutions for faster evaluation of real-world machines, explaining how to improve system understanding with dynamic motion analysis to Identify real behavior of the machine assembly and Identify peak loads.

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.

Simon Zwingert, Technical Consultant, gives a Demo Sessions on Altair Simulation Solutions for faster evaluation of real-world machines, explaining how, to improve the design with studies and the design exploration on the complete assembly to perform weld line optimization.

Daniel Jauss, Application Engineer CAE, gives a Demo Sessions on Altair Simulation Solutions for faster evaluation of real-world machines, explaining how to realize vibration reduction with topology optimization performing a modal analysis & Optimization of a machine portal, identifies economic manufacturing alternatives, and conducts a topology optimization for sheet metal constructions.

Industry expert Dennis Baum presents how Weber Maschinenbau applies simulation, how simulation can be used along product lifecycle and which benefits arise to customers and internal processes.

In his presentation, Sebastian Wachter of Porsche takes us through an exciting project where topology optimisation technologies were combined with 3D printing to create a highly innovative engine-gearbox housing that is 10% lighter than the existing component and twice as stiff.

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.

By performing structural analyses on fully featured CAD assemblies within minutes, SimSolid is the game-changing simulation technology for designers, engineers, and analysts. It eliminates geometry preparation and meshing: the two most time-consuming, expertise-extensive, and error-prone tasks performed in a conventional structural simulation. Early-stage assessment of complex assemblies can be particularly challenging for CAD-based simulation tools and FEA alike, but SimSolid is tolerant of imprecise geometry, meaning no simplification of complex geometries is needed before analyzing designs. Multiple design scenarios can be simulated quickly under real-life conditions, providing the simulation power to help accelerate engineering decisions, aid development of quality products, and beat competitors to market. Tony Jones, Chief Engineer at Andron Handling, demonstrates the use of SimSolid in the design development of its bespoke mechanical equipment. Seeking to assess the strength of the welded fabrication and vertical clamping arms for both lifting and clamping loads, Andron Handling utilized SimSolid to model the entire assembly of their bespoke handler design. They were able to include details such as sliding connections, clamping force on the pistons, and matching reactions on the cylinder bodies to ensure accuracy, and complete their simulation run in less than a minute, allowing multiple design iterations to be explored.

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.

Photorealistic rendering has become a cornerstone for architectural visualization. Altair’s developers have collaborated with NVIDIA to leverage NVIDIA OptiX™ denoising technology to maximize the speed-up without compromising quality for both exterior and interior rendering scenes. We'll walk through some of the most recent benchmarks of Altair Thea Render™, showing performance gain on NVIDIA RTX hardware.

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.

Full evaluation of a design concept requires the definition of many complex details. However, complex geometric details constrain design flexibility. Think of the value of a complex model defined in a way that both details and basic design elements can be changed in seconds. The new suite of parametric free-form surface and solid shape parameters in the 2020 release of Inspire Studio make it possible to explore and analyze broad ranges of a design space. The presentation was part of the ATCx CFD 2020, presented by Paul Stewart, VP, Automotive Aerodynamics Modeling and Visualization at Altair

Full evaluation of a design concept requires the definition of many complex details. However, complex geometric details constrain design flexibility.

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.

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.