Fly High with Optimization - Optimizing Camcopter® S-100 Design at Schiebel

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.

Urwahn Engineering GmbH is a startup in the biking sector. While bikes must meet many requirements to pass globally recognized test and load case scenarios according to DIN ISO 4210 safety standards, they must also be light to reduce raw material usage and create the best possible user experience. For this aim, simulation has always played a key role at Urwahn, a team that strives to maximize functionality and performance by using state-of-the-art tools. Under the Altair Startup program, Urwahn received access to Altair® Inspire™. To meet the DIN ISO 4210’s safety requirements, they simulated five load cases on the steel frame structure, studied the behavior of the single 3D-printed parts, and explored the impact of the material distribution on the overall system behavior. Inspire’s integrated topology optimization solver enabled Urwahn to push the material usage limit, reducing weight and costs while keeping stiffness and other boundary conditions on target.

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.

With more than 35 years of experience in research & development projects INESPASA has been working with companies such as Airbus, Alestis, Boeing, and Renault. To be successful in a highly competitive market, aeronautical tooling companies like INESPASA must deliver maximum quality and comply with highly demanding standards and regulations while meeting tight time constraints and limited budgets. Developing and testing aircraft component prototypes is time consuming and expensive, so INESPASA had to find new and faster ways – like Multiphysics simulation – to evaluate its aero-structure designs, identify problems before they occur, and ensure viability. INESPASA turned to Altair and applied tools such as Altair SimSolid®, Altair® Inspire™ and Altair® MotionSolve®. Thanks to fast simulation results, INESPASA addressed their challenge and found the solution with the best weight-stiffness ratio providing optimum usability of their aero structure elements.

Noise reduction is an important issue when developing products and components for railway applications. Recently, Ultimate Europe had to perform an acoustic analysis of a rail carriage bellow. In addition to its own broad portfolio of simulation solutions, Altair offers a wide selection of complementary software tools through the Altair Partner Alliance (APA). With Altair’s unique, flexible licensing model customers have access to these solutions at no additional costs. Altair Units allowed Ultimate to leverage APA products and access the functionalities of AlphaCell to predict the acoustic response of the bellow. Results included reduced run time, a decrease in model set up time, and increased combined metric correlation.

As the traditional optimization process at Renault required many iterations, simulation engineer involvement, and a considerable amount of time, the company was looking for tools and methods to improve this process. They wanted to implement a new, easy-to-use simulation tool that would allow non-experts, part-time analysts, and designers to gain insight and accurate results in early design phases of Renault chassis projects. With the goal to enable designers to run simulation by themselves without being dependent on the engineer’s calculations, the team began using Altair Inspire. The implementation on the Altair HPC platform enabled the engineers to send their highly complex calculations to the HPC server while running calculations on their workstation. The results included time savings, an 80% increase in process automation and mass reduction up to 20%.

Etteplan offers engineering solutions to the world’s leading manufacturing companies for industrial equipment and plant engineering. Etteplan’s client Wärtsilä were looking to redesign their valve spring press tools used for mounting cylinder head valves. Altair OptiStruct™ and Altair Inspire™ were used to run topology optimization and finite element analyses to create design concepts, and Additive Works’ Amphyon software simulated the print process. This resulted in Etteplan’s additive manufacturing press tool design being ready to be printed within one week from when the project starting data was frozen.

MOTO-MAQLAB-UC3M was founded in 2010 by students at Carlos III University in Madrid, Spain, to develop a racing motorcycle for the international MotoStudent competition. MotoStudent is an international event held every two years at the MotorLand, Aragon circuit and welcomes university teams from all over the world. The MOTO-MAQLAB-UC3M team won awards in several categories of the fourth MotoStudent edition. Inspired by their successful participation, the students wanted to further develop and improve their race bike designs to repeat or exceed these results. In order to improve their results, the MOTO-MAQLAB-UC3M team needed to reduce the mass in the cycle parts of the bike. Altair solutions enabled the MOTO-MAQLAB-UC3M team to approximate the ideal number of layers, their shape, order, and direction. Mass reduction of 30% was achieved while maintaining the original stiffness.

GAC engineers used Altair CFD’s Lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) solver to perform hundreds of transient simulations on design changes with high-accuracy using NVIDIA’s Tesla-V100 GPUs to increase computing efficiency. Results include achieving one of the highest aerodynamic efficient vehicle designs in its class on the GAC GS4 coupe, and on the concept GAC ENO.146, while at the same time realizing model preparation time savings of 60% and simulation cost savings of 70%.

Würth Industrie Service GmbH & Co. KG (WIS) is an independent subsidiary of the Würth Group, providing integrated logistics solutions for automated, efficient supply of production materials as well as auxiliary and operating materials. The company offers individually tailored, logistical supply and service concepts such as scanner-supported rack systems and automated electronic ordering systems. In line with the company’s ultimate goals including innovation, cost reduction, and process optimization, WIS wanted to explore how simulation can be used to improve its products. As achieving a lightweight design was one of its main goals, the company started a collaboration project with Altair to perform topology optimizations on components of its KUKA robots. The project resulted in weight savings of 87%, leading to a reduction of repair costs by 94% and for used LED strips by 50%.

To support its goal of accelerating the development cycle, early in 2020 NIAR commissioned a study to assess the scalability of Altair Radioss™, Altair’s structural analysis solver for highly non-linear problems under dynamic loadings. Regular support from an Altair engineer ensured swift familiarization with Radioss. The study was performed on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). OCI with its bare metal HPC shapes that use low latency RDMA interconnect provided highly scalable infrastructure-as-a-service (IAAS) for Radioss.

Payload is a key performance measure for military vehicles, determining how many personnel and/or goods can be carried. Reflecting this, the US Army Ground Vehicle Systems Center (GVSC) is engaged in a project to reduce the curb weight of vehicles, and thereby boost payloads, by redesigning and replacing existing components with lighter alternatives. Specifically, GVSC is combining topology optimization with additive manufacturing to realize significant weight savings, without compromising other critical requirements. Altair was contracted for external expertise to create new component designs. The results included achievement of 67% mass reduction for an alternator bracket, and cheaper costs than the current machined baseline.

In modern passenger transport systems, flawless operation, comfort, and safety are key engineering criteria for design. To guarantee these key performance indicators, demanding fatigue tests are performed to ensure a component’s performance and strength. Advanced simulation methods can help to achieve an optimal design and ensure that components meet even the highest safety requirements. Using Altair Inspire, Doppelmayr, a manufacturer of ropeways and innovative transportation systems for ski areas and urban areas, built a design that passed the safety test, and optimized the gondola station to be lighter, safer, and more durable than requested. More recently, Doppelmayr also started using Altair SimSolid™ to explore its designs and create structural efficient concepts for large models and complex assemblies.

The idea for its cooling technology for electric motor systems was born at high-tech start-up Dynamic E flow (DEF), when the founders first experienced an overheated engine of an electrical car. The existent development process at DEF used analytical methods and physical testing to confirm results. With increasing customization, that process was not flexible enough to handle various design possibilities. With the need for a simulative design approach, DEF employed Altair software to tackle its multi-physical design challenges, and to meet all the customer requirements for their unique motors, test hundreds of variants, and to check the feasibility of the customized product.

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.

When planning offices and foyers to showcase the hallmark values of their customers, many architects benefit from the open and inviting atmosphere of glass structures. Faraone, designer and manufacturer of such lightweight structures, used Altair solutions to analyze and redesign support structures for large-scale glass elements, which are the core business of the company. The results are topologically optimized and stiffer aluminum channels that can host the structural glass element. With cost reduction, shorter development times, and design efficiency, this use case from Faraone demonstrates the benefits of simulation technologies in accelerating product development.

At the end of 2015, the XPRIZE foundation launched the Shell Ocean Discovery competition, a three-year global challenge to advance deep-sea exploration using autonomous subsea drones. Teams competed to develop underwater robots that could fully map 500 km2 of seafloor at a 4 km depth in less than 24 hours with no human intervention. One of the competing teams was TEAMTAO, a collaboration of Newcastle University, SMD (Soil Machine Dynamics Ltd), and UK Research and Innovation. Altair joined the project as a technical design partner and provided the team with simulation expertise to virtually simulate, optimize, and test the devices. Altair simulation specialists followed a simulation-driven design approach in order to save on development time and physical prototyping.

TGM Lightweight Solutions is an engineering services company with a focus on lightweight design and strategic weight optimization for aircraft, rail cars, road vehicles, and marine vessels. For a recent customer project requiring weight reduction of a railway container, TGM used Altair HyperWorks to achieve the target weight. Topology optimization helped identify the weight savings potential, resulting in material and cost savings, and a 20% reduction in weight while meeting tight development schedules.

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.

BOTT stands for “Battle of the Twins,” a racing category for motorbikes with two-cylinder four stroke engines. Bottpower is a Spanish motorsport engineering company located in Valencia. They specialize in designing and building custom motorbikes for racing and street use. They design and build parts, systems, and prototypes for other companies. A project challenge at Bottpower was to design a lightweight stay bracket for their motorbike that could withstand the main and aerodynamic loads. The goal was finding the optimal weight and stiffness ratio to reduce weight while ensuring safety measures. All of this had to be done quickly in order to arrive on time at Addit3D, Spain's most important 3D-print fair, to showcase the bike. The optimal design for aerodynamic loads was found using Altair software.

To expand the rpm range of a motorcycle engine, a new type of rocker arm with lower inertia was needed at KTM. The new rocker arm was required to have the same, or better stiffness and deformation level as the previous design. KTM used Altair HyperWorks™ for nonlinear topology optimization and nonlinear structural analysis to develop the new rocker arm. Thanks to this, the component inertia could be reduced by 15 percent, component mass was reduced by 21 percent, and the stiffness increased by 14 percent which lead to an extension of the rotational speed by 150-200 rpm.

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) is a renowned global architectural, urban planning, and engineering firm. Known for some of the world’s most technically and environmentally advanced buildings, SOM applies creativity and emerging technologies to design buildings for the future. SOM designed the new United States Courthouse in Downtown Los Angeles to be an open and transparent public space, while also constantly considering the materials used in the project and the project's environmental footprint. The structural design specialists at SOM used Altair OptiStruct to generate an ideal project plan that considered sustainable regulations and manufacturing constraints.

Rimac Automobili’s main challenge has been to design a monocoque as a single carbon fiber part with an unprecedented size. Hence, in the development of the monocoque, the main topic to manage was the material, a lightweight, carbon fiber reinforced with epoxy resin. As this carbon fiber is an orthotropic and brittle material, its representation in a finite element (FE) material card is very difficult. To meet this challenge the company introduced Altair HyperWorks™ into their development process.

Renault Nissan Mitsubishi Alliance is a French-Japanese strategic partnership between the automobile manufacturers Renault (based in France), Nissan (based in Japan) and Mitsubishi Motors (based in Japan). Today, the automotive group has 122 manufacturing plants worldwide with nearly 450,000 employees controlling ten major brands: Renault, Nissan, Mitsubishi, Infiniti, Renault Samsung, Dacia, Alpine, Datsun, Venucia, and Lada. The ambition of the alliance is to offer autonomous drive, connectivity features, and services on a wide range of affordable vehicles. As part of the Renault Chassis Le Mans plant, which is building car-to-ground connecting components for the Renault Group and for the Alliance, the CTC Chassis Technical Center is a CAD engineering center where 350 engineers and technicians are working with a focus on testing and validation. Renault has been using SimSolid to perform simulations to develop lighter chassis faster.

New airborne solutions are being developed to accommodate one or more persons for air travel. Explorations including large drones, small helicopters, airplanes, and flying cars will enable companies to respond to the demand for Personal Air Mobility (PAM). The team at Talaria was founded by students at the Delft University of Technology. The idea for Talaria’s Individual Air Mobility project began at the end of 2017. Founder Philipp Essle heard about the Boeing GoFly competition which rewarded the best designs for a one-person aircraft. Talaria’s mission is to develop an electrically driven PAM that can take-off and land vertically in urban environments. Talaria is using Altair Inspire to check whether material and weight could be reduced through topology optimization. This approach resulted in a significant 1.5-kilogram weight reduction of the rotor hubs.

Using Altair simulation software, Gurit supports Western Sydney University's Bridgestone World Solar Challenge team, helping them design the most efficient and aerodynamic car possible, while ensuring driver safety and adhering to class rules.

Formula SAE is a collegiate design series run by Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE), which challenges students to design, build and compete with an open wheel style car across various events. The competition pitches various teams across different static events focusing on the teams engineering design decisions, cost planning, marketing strategies and vehicle inspections. The teams also have to compete under various dynamic events like acceleration, skid-pad, autocross and the endurance run where even the fuel economy is checked.

Canadian start-up company Philomec specializes in mechanical engineering services that helps companies design and optimize their products using mechanical and biomechanical FEM simulation. Their creation of customized, validated biomechanical models, and the analysis of simulation results by experts allows surgeons to choose the model of an implant and adapt surgical maneuvers to a specific patient, thus reducing the number of implants used, as well as the risk of complications. It is challenging to validate biomechanical models due to the complexity of materials, scarcity of experimental data, and the lack of representation of variability. The application of Altair HyperWorks for explicit multiphysics simulation provides a high-level of confidence in the validity and stability of the musculoskeletal models.

For pioneering a new material application and technology without a road map, Guerrilla Gravity used Altair OptiStruct in the early design design phase. The result was the development of lightweight, high-performance bikes, that are 300% more impact resistant than other frames on the market that use traditional carbon fiber materials, at significant cost savings and shortened timelines.

The South African aviation manufacturing solutions provider Aerosud and the South African Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) teamed up to launch a challenging 3D printing project, Aeroswift. Aeroswift collaborated with Altair to develop a methodology for designing large additively manufactured products. An Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) frame was designed as a demonstration and subsequently printed on Aeroswift. To improve manufacturability while meeting all component requirements, the project engineers used Altair Inspire™ and its topology optimization capabilities in the design process.

VTT has been testing AM process simulation tools for inclusion in their design for AM workflow. Through these tests, Additive Works’ Amphyon software was found to predict component level geometric distortion values that corresponded well with measurements, give an indication of potential print failure due to recoater contact, and is easy to learn and use.

Additive Works will replace these extensive iterations by the use of process simulation and optimization to create a support structure first-time-right.

Czech company Duratec Ltd. develops handmade bike frames using both aluminium and composite materials. For a recent project at Duratec presenting the latest approach in development of carbon fiber optimization of the bike frame, Altair HyperWorks was used for model creation in Altair HyperMesh, optimized via the Altair OptiStruct code and evaluated in Altair HyperView in the development and optimization of a lightweight composite racing bike frame.

An Altair customer for many years, Schneider Electric at first used only Altair Flux; now the company has extended their usage to several more software products in the Altair HyperWorks suite, including solutions such as Activate, MotionSolve, OptiStruct, and others to apply co-simulation in their development processes. Schneider feels their collaboration with Altair is more like a partnership than the standard supplier-OEM relationship.

Israeli motorsport company Griiip has designed a new, fast and professional race car that combines efficiency in racing with a competitive purchase price and low running costs, to make it more affordable. By harnessing the power of data, Griiip has created the first smart connected race car – the G1 – and with it, an entirely new racing series. Accessing the software via Altair's new Startup Program, Griiip engineers employ several products from the Altair HyperWorks™ suite, among these Altair Radioss™ for crash simulation, Altair OptiStruct™ for structural optimization, general FE analysis as well as Altair HyperMesh™ and Altair HyperView™ for pre- and post-processing tasks in the development of race cars.

Sharda Motor Industries Limited (SMIL) is the market leader in the country in the manufacturing of exhaust systems, catalytic converters, independent suspension systems, seat frames, seat covers (two and four wheelers), soft top canopies, and stamped part for white goods products. Their state-of-the-art manufacturing facilities help them to continuously focus on new products, innovation, technology upgradation, and research & development. The facility seamlessly caters to various emission norms ranging from BS4, BS6, and Tier 4.

Tucked away in a remote location in the mountains, designed by ZHA, the Lushan primary school, when complete, will be an educational institute located 160 kilometers North-West of Nanchang, the capital of China’s Jiangxi province.

The National Composites Centre (NCC), in collaboration with the Manufacturing Technology Centre (MTC), Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC) and University of Warwick (WMG) worked on a collaborative project to develop a Cross-Catapult technology demonstrator; the Mono-Ski or Sit-ski, a device for sports that uses adaptive equipment on mountain slopes, designed for individuals with lower extremity limitations. Composites were used extensively in the new Sit-ski design with the Altair HyperWorks™ suite being utilized throughout the development process.

Mabe is a Mexico-based international appliance company designing, producing and distributing a wide spectrum of home appliances such as washing machines, dryers, cooking ranges, refrigerators, air-conditioners, microwaves, etc. Altair technology has enabled Mabe to increase the capacity of their washing machines by 35%, and the spin speed by 24% while reducing the cost per cubic foot by 10%.

At the forefront of innovation at CEC Systems is the world’s first semi-automated Collapsible-Economic-Container. Achieving a 4:1 ratio, COLLAPSECON® enables 4 empty containers to be collapsed and combined to form a single container, improving operational efficiency, enhancing return on investment and reducing the impact on the environment. For the design for mass production and optimal operational use, the Altair HyperWorks Suite was leveraged to find solutions for weight reduction without increasing manufacturing costs. The newly engineered container is potentially 30% lighter than the original design, whilst reducing material requirements, increasing manufacturing efficiency, and reducing cost.