Lighter, Stronger, Quieter Vehicles - New Design Space Workflow for Structural Inserts at Sika

Crashworthiness optimization at BMW with AI-enhanced surrogate modeling. BMW uses Altair’s integrated Machine Learning solutions within HyperWorks to generate optimization constraints that mimic engineering expertise. Clustering, an unsupervised machine learning algorithm, helps engineers to understand how crash kinematics affect key performance indicators (KPIs). Favorable crash kinematics are then enforced during the optimization process through the use of a classifier that, in effect, emulates engineering decision making throughout the process.

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.

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.

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.