Exploring the Design of a Medical System with Rapid 1D System Simulation

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.

As a key to growth in the coffee machine industry, innovation has always been a core pillar of Gruppo Cimbali’s company philosophy. Investing in the research and development of high-performance machines is a strategic decision, and Gruppo Cimbali is proud to be recognized as one of the first companies in the sector to expand into telemetry, Internet of Things (IoT), and Wi-Fi connected machines. To continue to deliver on its innovation promise, the company now applies digital twins – utilizing Altair Activate® – to their development processes enabling it to design better products, shorten development times, and increase energy efficiency.

Improving perceived quality and passenger comfort by minimizing buzz, squeak, and rattle (BSR) and eliminating unwanted noises in a car is a common challenge in vehicle development, especially as these issues are often detected late in the development phase. The new aspect to this challenge is the development of electrical vehicles (EV) that do not have a combustion engine covering up these small noises. Headquartered in Göteborg, Sweden, China Euro Vehicle Technology AB (CEVT) is a subsidiary of Geely Holding Group, a global automotive group including brands such as Volvo Cars, Lotus, and others. CEVT is an innovation center for mobility solutions, focusing on vehicle architecture. To facilitate and improve design choices early in the development phase, CEVT uses Altair solutions and multi-disciplinary optimization for a simulation-driven design approach allowing for rapid design iterations.

High accuracy sensors and encoders are integral components of an e-motor drive, greatly impacting the quality and efficiency on the system. A purpose-driven simulation approach is needed to account for all the physical interdependencies within these complex multi-domain systems. Lenord + Bauer worked with Altair to develop a system simulation process for their high-accuracy encoders to understand their impact on the quality and efficiency of the system.

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.

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.

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.

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%.

Ankers performed co-simulation using a combined multibody and brake systems model in MotionView and Activate to generate more accurate results to analyze thermal and other effects on braking.

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.