Pressing for Change at ATNA - Simulation for Innovative Design: A New Approach to Holistic Design Decisions

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%.

There has been an increasing need for GM design teams to develop their technical abilities to perform structural analysis and be able to evaluate their own designs. The simulation (Altair competitor) software initially utilized by designers proved problematic, and GM was keen to investigate a new approach. Altair SimSolid provided them with an alternative which not only dramatically decreased preprocessing time, it also allowed designers to evaluate complex components and complete ensembles which was not possible with the previously used software. For modal analysis at the component level, a correlation factor of 97% was found with SimSolid, compared to the center’s existing solver. With SimSolid, this was combined with a 75% reduction in time taken to complete the analysis. Of that saving, 81% is accounted for by pre-processing, the rest for generating the solution.

As a market leader in small-scale passenger transportation, the Tribus Group develops products for wheelchair-accessible passenger transportation ranging from foldable, ergonomic seats and easy-to-install wheelchair lifts to electric minibuses and low-floor buses. A recent innovation is its awarded Movitas electric city bus – an energy efficient, modular, and 100% electric city bus for public transportation and deliveries. Tribus engineers were asked to optimize the entire bus within an existing design and dimensions to minimize energy consumption and extend driving range. Working with SimSolid greatly accelerated the process, with results that far exceeded their set targets. The optimization of the Movitas bus resulted in a total weight reduction of 1,900 kilograms, making it both more energy-efficient and comfortable.

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.

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.

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.

Developing new factory lines and assembly machines is a very challenging task. These systems are incredibly complex and contain many different components and subsystems. Vierhout Engineering improved their structural steel machine framing using Altair's mesh-free simulation tools.

To build a very simple, robust, sustainable roof structure for a prosthesis lab associated with the Centre medico-chirurgical de l'Ulcère de Buruli, which is a hospital in Bouaké, on the Ivory Coast of Africa, the project team used Altair SimSolid, to conduct very fast, full assembly tests, saving time and money, while providing increased flexibility, without compromising accuracy.

Serapid, the developer and manufacturer of the original Rigid Chain, designs and manufactures telescopic mechanical actuators for the horizontal and vertical movement of heavy loads. See how they use Altair SimSolid™ to aid in gravity loads of complete structure simulation.

See how McFarlane Hand and Upper Limb Centre in London, Ontario is uses Altair SimSolid™ to evaluate the biomechanics of bone stresses.

Andron Handling needed to assess the strength of the welded fabrication and vertical clamping arms for both lifting and clamping loads. In previous analysis of this type in Altair SimSolid™, they would have removed the wheels from the model and applied reaction forces at the bottom of each of the clamp arms. In this case, Andron used a different approach that would not have been possible with previous FEA toolsets.