Emulating Engineering Expertise With AI

Jyoti CNC Automation Ltd. designs and manufactures a wide array of CNC Machines for metal cutting industries. They utilized Altair HyperMesh to optimize the existing design and improve static stiffness of their machines, and Altair HyperWorks to reach the optimized design and arrangement. Altair OptiStruct solver was then used to validate the effectiveness of the optimized product design. The result was an immense benefit in terms of resources and cost saved as mechanical accuracies were ensured right at the stage of the FEA software level, without having to create the physical prototype.

As inductive heating becomes more popular, cookware manufacturers must develop efficient cooking pans that meet consumers’ expectations. Groupe SEB’s engineers aimed to create a new pan that fulfilled product requirements while minimizing material and development costs. Because testing physical prototypes is time-consuming, the engineers created a virtual prototype of an induction hob. The Groupe SEB’s team realized a parametric model of an induction hob heating system considered the entire system’s magnetic and thermal aspects. Parallel lab tests confirmed the numeric model’s accuracy, which gave the engineers a better understanding of the induction exchange, and helped them eliminate valid but inefficient solutions before building the first prototype.

Founded in 1961, STARCO develops and delivers high-quality wheel and tire solutions to the European market. Since 2017, STARCO has been part of the KENDA Group, one of the world’s major tire and tube manufacturers, with a workforce of over 12,000 employees and sites all over the world. Developing wheels has always been a big engineering task – manufacturers have to meet high performance targets while also meeting budget, material, and environmental requirements – a difficult, time-consuming challenge for engineers today is the model setup. To solve some of these challenges STARCO turned to Altair, who provided a solution: Altair® HyperWorks® is a high-performance finite-element pre-processor that provides a highly interactive and visual environment to analyze product design performance, offering direct interfaces to commercial CAD and CAE systems and a rich suite of easy-to-use tools to build and edit CAE models.

An engineer working for Northrop Grumman Systems Corporation Marine Systems (NGSC-MS) was given a project to improve their teams’ current NASTRAN results post-processing workflow by writing a script to automate the task. They reached out to Altair for collaboration and Altair engineers were able to quickly determine that Altair’s mathematical modeling environment – “Altair Compose” – would be the ideal solution due to its ability to read, manipulate, and write NASTRAN results. Also, the Open Matrix Language is a scripting language that is familiar to the engineering community. Given sample NASTRAN results and requirements Altair engineers provided a “template” script. The NGSC-MS team was able to quickly understand and modify the script to their goals. The custom results were then viewable in HyperView as a contour plot, which saved a considerable amount of time during post-processing and documentation workflows.

Sika is a specialty chemicals company, and a leader in developing and producing systems and products for bonding, sealing, damping, reinforcing, and protecting in the building sector and automotive industry. Offering a wide range of BIW noise reduction and vibration damping solutions and addressing problems encountered in automotive development, Sika is a key development partner for OEMs and suppliers. Sika’s structural systems team focuses on solutions reinforcing the customer’s BIW and NVH issues. Using the Altair design space workflow, Sika engineers eliminated time-consuming steps in their workflow. This let them make faster decisions - instead of hours in the prior standard workflow, it now only takes minutes. Modeling time was reduced by 70%, giving the team to spend more time gaining a deeper knowledge of the part and its improvement. Sika won the 2018 Altair Enlighten Award with its ultra-lightweight constrained layer material composite for structure-borne noise reduction.

For more than 60 years, L&L Products have been providing unique solutions to the automotive industry. L&L Products Composite Body Solutions (CBS™) structural reinforcement technology is commonly used to enhance overall body-in-white (BIW) stiffness, other benefits include load path management, section integrity, light-weighting, increased durability, while having no impact in body shop practices. CBS™ aims to deliver an efficient solution for both current and future-ready applications requiring lightweighting. L&L Products reduced their concept topology optimization model build times by 80% by using the Altair® HyperWorks® Local Design Space workflow. The ability to create models more efficiently provides a mechanism to arrive at an optimal solution quickly, streamlines in-house processes removing the dependency on other teams, and provides an opportunity to explore more design variants to arrive at a truly optimal solution.

While rail is the most environmentally friendly means of transport, freight trains today do not look much different than those from the past. To reach the climate and energy targets of the European Union while achieving higher payloads and a better ROI, the railway sector needs an innovation boost to build more efficient and sustainable rail freight wagons. TransAnt GmbH, a joint venture with ÖBB Rail Cargo Group and voestalpine Steel Division, was established to bring more efficient and sustainable rail freight solutions to the market. With its innovative concept based on modularity and lightweight design, once operational the company seeks to revolutionize the market as a full supplier of freight wagons. The company used Altair® HyperWorks® for topology optimization – in particular Altair® HyperMesh® – to realize the transition to a weldable structure, Altair® HyperView® for pre- and post-processing, and Altair® OptiStruct® for FEA (including local buckling) and optimization.

In an effort to increase transportation safety, today’s bus rollover and crash test regulations have become more stringent. To ensure all products achieve the requisite safety regulations, Gemilang set up dedicated in-house testing facilities, including a tilt test platform to assess the stability of the vehicle, and a rollover test platform to ensure bus safety in the event of a rollover accident. Gemilang decided to leverage computer-aided engineering (CAE) simulation technologies to facilitate the bus rollover assessment during the early stage of product development and selected Altair as its technology partner.

Truck dynamics, control system, thermal, and fatigue analyses all need to be completed when designing a new truck design. Using Altair HyperWorks, Hitachi achieves a 10% weight reduction in the main frame and rigid body, while maintaining product quality.

One of the competing teams in the Formula SAE competition is FST Lisboa of the University of Lisboa, Portugal. 39 students from seven different faculties use their know-how on motorsport technology and high-precision engineering to design and build a racing car fit for the competition. For their last car, the team had to design a new set of rims to further reduce the weight of the rim set by 25 percent. With linear static analyses and topology optimization solutions from Altair, the team was able to make sound geometry choices for the rims, and reduce the weight of the components, while meeting all compliance requirements.

When Ana Casares Crespo, a former member of the ARUS Andalucía Racing team from University Seville in Spain, was looking for a final degree project, the team was inspired by the capabilities of Altair’s software. They came up with the idea to improve the impact properties of the vehicle nose cone laminate with the help of simulation. With more than seven students actively using Altair products to improve various aspects of the vehicle, the decision to incorporate Altair tools was an obvious choice. They wanted to make use of the knowledge they had gained from previous studies for structural design of aerodynamic packages. The team conducted static analysis and topological optimization using tools from the Altair HyperWorks™ suite, which helped them create optimized, lighter components. To improve the impact properties of a Formula SAE car’s nose cone laminate, the Altair solution included structural analysis, and topology optimization verifying structural behavior of a new material. The benefits were improved impact characteristics and fracture properties, and lighter components.

Analysis and optimization to improve crash performance while reducing reliance on physical tests.

Gestamp selected Altair to develop a set of custom tools within HyperWorks, eliminating the need for an initial 'trial and error' design loop while reducing mass and increasing durability of a rear twist beam suspension system. The company achieved a reduction in lead time while producing competitive low cost, low mass RTB designs.

One of the world’s leading suppliers of oilfield services, products, technology and systems, Baker Hughes operates globally with nearly 59,000 employees. The company, headquartered in Houston, Texas, recently recorded $21.4 billion in annual revenue from sales of both services and highly innovative products for the world’s oil and natural gas industry.

This success story illustrates how a reputed engineering institute of national acclaim has set-up a CAE - Optimization Lab, equipped with Altair HyperWorks CAE tools, to expose their students to the latest technologies in product design, analysis, and optimization. Within the range of the CAE - Optimization Lab, CoEP has launched various courses to impart knowledge on Altair HyperWorks. This CoEP initiative bridges the gap between industry expectations and needs and the knowledge that graduating students possess. Being trained on advanced and contemporary technologies such as the HyperWorks suite has opened new opportunities for students to embark their career, has improved the national ranking of the college due to investing in a modern and robust infrastructure, and also has benefitted the industry by creating a talent pool of well-trained manpower, available to work on breakthrough engineering initiatives.

CAE is a core element in developing high-end, long-lasting professional power tools at DeWalt, a Stanley Black & Decker brand.

CAE Simulation driven Product Development of Expandable Liner Hanger presentation given by Ganesh Nanaware of Baker Hughes at ATCx Energy 2014.

As design exploration and optimization methods have become commonly accepted across a range of industries, such as aerospace, automotive or oil and gas, they are frequently utilized as standard practice to efficiently produce designs and aid critical engineering decisions. The widespread acceptance of these methods coupled with the power of modern computing has led to applications across a range of design problems and ever-increasing complexity. The size and scope of this expansion continually pushes the boundaries of existing exploration and optimization methods. Furthermore, a complete exploration of the optimal design space includes computationally intensive features such as multi-objective optimization, to understand the trade-off between competing objectives, and global optimization, to avoid local extrema.

Automating CAE connectors creation in HyperMesh and utilizing HyperStudy for pedestrian impact simulation helped optimize Tesla’s design cycle and get better crash and safety performance.

Gestamp Tallent Ltd is a world class designer, developer and manufacturer of cutting edge, chassis structural and suspension products, body in white structures, modules and systems for the automotive industry. Gestamp used the BMW MINI front subframe tower to demonstrate the weld distortion optimisation approach. The tower is particularly susceptible to distortion due to its tall and thin dimensions. The objective of this optimisation was to minimise the distortion of the tower measured by the displacement of the top of the tower as the weld sections cool. In order to further investigate weld removal optimisation they chose HyperStudy.

Using HyperWorks for Teaching Computational Optimization Methods in Engineering Design at Northwestern University

Carmakers the world over are investing heavily in the development of lighter vehicles and more economical engines that can go further on less fuel. Renault’s powertrain division wanted to further decrease the weight and increase the performance of existing and in-devolopment engines by redesigning key components to use a minimum amount of material. As an existing user of Altair’s simulation solutions, Renault approached Altair ProductDesign to assist in the development of the required optimization design methods and processes for use at component and sub-system levels.

HBPO GmbH optimizes their design process by utilizing multiple products, such Total Materia and MADYMO, alongside HyperWorks products for the development of their front end modules.

Assystem is an international engineering and innovation consultancy group with a presence in 14 countries and 8500 employees. HyperMesh, RADIOSS and HyperStudy were used to design the safest possible nuclear encapsulation vessel for securely containing nuclear material. The designs not only achieved pressure vessel code PD5500 standards, but also helped Assystem gain external accreditation for the pressure vessel’s compliance to code. Download the Assystem Case Study

Much more goes into a golf club than simply wood, iron and graphite. To shape the performance, the distinctive appearance, the personalized feel and even the sound of the club striking the ball, manufacturers must precisely engineer every aspect of the design. Today, simulation-driven design has dramatically reduced development time for new golf clubs while allowing them to meet strict regulations more efficiently.

Sophisticated simulation tools enable aerospace engineers to study the feasibility of airbag landing systems.

Optimization technology delivers innovative suspension design for Alfa Romeo's sleek concept car.

Wagon Automotive, a system and module supplier of components to major car builders, sought ways to accelerate product development and reduce prototyping costs while maintaining high quality. Adopting the HyperWorks suite of advanced CAE tools enabled the company to achieve both those goals. Wagon Automotive now uses HyperWorks during the entire development cycle, from concept design to optimization.

In 2019, engineers at Schneider Electric’s R&D center in Mexico took on a project to study the dynamic performance of a microgenerator designed to power a wireless communication card for lighting switches by self-harvesting energy. However, to achieve a successful design, particular consideration needed to be given to operating temperature specifications. Differing operating conditions had to be explored to determine the energy performance of the generator. A fully integrated, multi-physics toolkit was achieved by complementing Altair Flux with Altair Activate™, Altair Compose™, and Altair HyperStudy™. The flexibility and capability of these tools had a dramatic effect not only on the performance outcome, but also the speed with which results were obtained. Moreover, robust risk management was assured, with effective simulation and optimization preventing engineers from heading in the wrong direction, or building prototypes that did not meet the desired objectives.