Optimized Energy Harvesting for Sustainable Smart Lighting Systems

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.

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.

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.

ZF develops a wide variety of e-motors and e-drives for a broad spectrum of automotive customers. To optimally incorporate development and production costs from the outset, their designers must find solutions to maximize shared parts within the given requirements for the motors. ZF, in collaboration with Altair, employed a simulation and data-driven solution that empowered them to consider shared parts, costs, and further constraints to automatically find best configurations for a modular motor platform.

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.

The competitive consumer device industry has quick time-to-market deadlines. Smartphone cameras use voice coil motor (VCM) actuators to translate a lens in three degrees of freedom in order to bring an object to focus on the image plane and to optically stabilize the camera. To ensure optimal design, the Motorola Mobility team selected Altair Flux™ to simulate the entire VCM and camera system. Flux allowed the team to quickly validate designs and ensure that the part compatibility and camera performance met the design targets. Other devices within the phone, such as speakers, antenna shields, accessory magnets etc. can affect the VCM performance due to magnetic interference. With Flux, the team simulated the entire VCM and phone layout, accounting for all possible magnetic interference from other devices.

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.

For a recent project, Altran, a leading global engineering consultant company, designed a fluidic circuit for a hemodialysis system. One of the main requirements for hemodialysis is to keep the temperature of the dialysis solution stable while it is flowing through the device. To achieve this, they investigated different layouts and optimal parameters for the fluidic system to minimize heat loss. Since the Finite Element model comprised of more than 7 million elements, they decided to explore different, more rapid simulation strategies for the design exploration stage. Reduced Order Models (ROM) were created using Altair Activate® and Compose® and were validated through comparison with existing CFD models. The use of ROMs, with 30x shorter simulation time, was not just ideal for quick optimization of the system, but also allowed Altran Engineers to challenge, and significantly alter the existing design of the circuit by increasing the number of considered layouts by 1000% (from 5 to 55).

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.

French startup Gulplug, located in Grenoble, France, has set out to revolutionize plug and charging technology used in today's electric and hybrid vehicles. To create new products and to drive innovation in the market, Gulplug is using Altair Flux™ and the Altair startup program. Flux helped Gulplug to model and create an innovative, clean, automatically self-plugging, magnetic based charging solution for electric vehicles.

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.

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.

Bental Motion Systems, a member of the Gevasol Group, produces a variety of end applications including motors, alternators, and electrical brakes for the aerospace & defense, and semiconductor industries. To accelerate the design of electric machines while reacting fast to customer specific requirements, Bental uses Altair FluxMotor to enable quick concept exploration including valuable predictions on machine performance, parameters, and productivity feasibility checks.

The shift toward e-mobility is increasing pressure on the automotive industry as the world awaits more sustainable and affordable solutions. New players are entering the market with fresh ideas and groundbreaking technologies. EVR Motors Ltd. is one of these. The company designs and develops cost-effective radial flux Permanent Magnet (PM) electric machines for a range of power conversion applications. EVR, established in 2012, began developing patents for wind turbine generators. They then adjusted their roadmap to include e-mobility, and developed an innovative e-motor called TS – RFPM based on new, patented technology that provides superior power and torque density – all at lower production costs. When looking for a powerful and accurate electromagnetic and mechanical simulation tool, they chose the Altair simulation tools to simulate their motors before prototyping. Through simulation, EVR developed and tested its new patented motor, which is half the size than some of the industry’s best e-motors.