Scaling the Infinite with Altair

This presentation discusses the rise of intelligent design technologies used throughout industry to rapidly assess and optimize product performance before physical prototypes. The session includes a brief hands-on demonstration of some of the latest, easy-to-use simulation technologies that are empowering designers and design engineers around the world to capitalize on the digital design revolution. Speakers: Dr. Royston Jones, CTO, Altair Ken Welch, Senior VP Inspire Design and Manufacturing Products, Altair Duration: 20 minutes

This workshop demonstrates how a simulation-driven design approach to product development can have a drastic impact on the performance, design time, and profitability of a new product. Using a belt sander tool as a demonstration model, our presenters show how Altair’s design and simulation technologies can conduct a concept design analysis and optimization of the sander external housing to improve stiffness and reduce weight. They go on to show how we can simulate the manufacturing process itself by looking at filling, packing, cooling and warpage of the plastic housing; before concluding with a series of stress analysis and validation studies such as a virtual drop test, 3-point bending simulation and even a study of the effect of the heat transfer of the electric motor. This is a valuable session to see how simulation technologies can be used throughout the design process, adding value and reducing development time at each stage. Speakers: Ujwal Patnaik, Global Business Development Manager, Altair Chris Sambell, Application Engineer, Altair Duration: 60 minutes

The usability of a headset is largely determined by a comfortable fit and its resistance to everyday use. Learn from Alice Lin, Manager of Mechanics at GN Audio R&D how she introduced FEM simulation capabilities at Jabra. The presentation shows how product design benefits from structural analysis, design for comfort, and drop test simulation. A future extension of simulation capabilities intends to address more areas and improve the simulation-driven design process efficiency. Speaker: Alice Lin, Manager of Mechanics, GN Audio Duration: 22 minutes Click the AD icon to select alternative audio translations - French, German, Portuguese and Spanish.

AAM has been providing mechanical drivelines to automotive customers for more than 25 years. As the automobile transitions to electrification, so too must the driveline. AAM has developed a suite of innovative, lightweight, compact and cost-optimized electric drive units and electric beam axles to meet the growing global technology demand as electric vehicles continue to expand over the next decade. Engineering simulation, optimization and validation tools were significant enablers to increase the validation confidence and reduce the time to market for these new products.

Sustainable designs last longer. David Yáñez from Vortex Bladeless, a Spanish start-up, shares his vision of the technology, the strategies used for the integration of the different physical phenomena involved in the simulation-driven design, and the development of their resonating structures having minimal parts susceptible to wear by friction. The simulation results from CFD, with fluid-structure interaction, and electromagnetic field simulation are compared with experimental wind tunnel results and from in-service environments.

Special-purpose machine design needs quick and flexible responses to individual customer requirements while maintaining a tight focus on quality and safety requirements. With limited time and personnel, the traditional FEM could not provide sufficient confidence for design decisions. Hear how ATNA Industry Solutions has turned simulation into a design tool. Speakers: Thomas Müller, Co-Founder, Commercial Manager, ATNA Industrial Solutions Hagen Möller, Design Engineer, ATNA Industrial Solutions Duration: 12 minutes

With lightweighting at the forefront of the sustainability discussion, Altair HyperWorks has introduced a targeted environment to rapidly create models for topology optimization. The complete HyperWorks Design Space environment includes an automotive-only non-design space library, collision detection, and a fast and efficient voxel Boolean mesh engine. It facilitates the creation of new model variants in seconds without the need to go back to CAD. In addition to automotive BIW architecture studies, it supports design space local and global modeling for generic sub-systems throughout different industries. The concept adhesive workflow is also available to identify location of structural adhesive.

As the demand for understanding part performance increases, design engineers are being asked to understand stresses and displacements early in the design cycle. Traditionally, when designing larger complex systems, the design process is linear, with CAE validation done after the design is complete. SimSolid’s revolutionary technology allows engineers to test multiple designs and what-if scenarios with a low learning curve while enabling a quicker, more integrated product development process.

Inspire’s new parametric modeling allows you to capture the evolution of your model’s shape by showing the linear sequence in which the geometry was created. You can roll the model backward or forward, as well as group, delete, insert, suppress, or edit entities in the History Browser. Inspire also features a new and improved sketching interface and several new sketching tools. See how you can use these new tools to seamlessly add, remove, and parameterize features in your model and then use the Variables table to quickly make design updates and see how they affect performance is in seconds to minutes.

In this session we will highlight how Altair HyperWorks supports efficient data processing and visualization, thereby helping users to make decisions faster. From the simulation-driven design workflow, fully integrated with HyperWorks’ model build functionalities, to the high-performance visualization and reporting of simulation results, HyperWorks provides the best framework to visualize, process, and report data

Altair products are quickly evolving into AI-driven products. Starting from the modeling and visualization products, the latest release of Altair HyperWorks includes features like shapeAI, which quickly finds and classifies parts “by shape” inside geometry files or finite element meshes - when you want to locate all of the bolts, shafts, and gears in a complex assembly - by applying machine learning.

At Altair, we see a future where seemingly disparate systems work seamlessly together to help businesses succeed. Where pin-point accuracy and speed mean the difference between winning and losing. The world of data science is intersecting with high-performance cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and IoT, unlocking limitless potential and enabling enterprises of all sizes to compete on a global scale while creating a more sustainable future.

Safety and reliability are paramount objectives of the aero-engine development work. Comprehensive dynamic simulation and testing ensure safe and reliable products. However, new design architectures with increasing demand for power density need to be developed in even shorter time scales. Robust structural dynamics are one key objective that needs to be addressed very early in the concept design. Today’s analysis tools need to make accurate dynamic predictions at the system level which takes a long time due to very large design iterations and robustness assessments. An approach to resolve this dilemma by combining Altair SimSolid with frequency-based coupling and data science thinking is presented. The presentation by Carsten Buchholz, Project Engineer for Hybrid Electric Flight Demonstrator at Rolls-Royce, aired at Future.AI in June 2021, and is almost 13 minutes long. Ready to see how your company can drive innovation with AI-powered design? Contact our solutions experts today. View all Future.AI 2021 Presentations

Dr. Fatma Kocer VP, Engineering Data Science at Altair showcases the impact of AI in development environments. In particular on how CAE tools will evolve and Design Exploration is taken to the next level.

Simon Zwingert, Technical Consultant, gives a Demo Sessions on Altair Simulation Solutions for faster evaluation of real-world machines, explaining how, to improve the design with studies and the design exploration on the complete assembly to perform weld line optimization.

Martin Kemp, Regional Manager at Altair, Dr. Denis Cumming, a Senior Lecturer at The University of Sheffield, John Milios, CEO at Sendyne, Dr. Gregory Offer, Reader at Imperial College London and finally Professor Jun Xu, Director of Vehicle Energy & Safety Laboratory at The University of North Carolina, present - Developing Predictive Electro Thermal Cell Models for Pack Level Deployment. This presentation will focus on the simulation of the battery cell to represent its complex thermal and mechanical behaviour. The thermal behaviour requires the simulation of the electric behaviour within the cell which leads to the generation of heat. Managing the thermal behaviour is fundamental to the long term health of the battery. The talk provides an overview of the technologies used to simulate battery behaviour, commencing with the understanding of the battery structure including the simulation of electrode manufacture. Both electrochemical and equivalent circuit models will be discussed with the advantages and disadvantages of both methods presented. Finally, machine learning technology is used to create an intelligent cell model which retains accuracy whilst delivering computational efficiency which can be used in Part 2.

Altair CTO James Dagg presents an overview of the journey Altair took to develop the leading modeling and visualization technologies we have today, and provides a look at what’s coming next to help you reduce your product delivery time. James Dagg has been at Altair for more than 30 years and is a visionary behind Altair’s software strategy and development activities. He has also led the development of Altair’s concept design technologies and oversaw the development of Altair’s CAE software suite for more than a decade.

In his presentation, Dr. Darren Ashby, CAE Group Leader at Jaguar Land Rover discusses some of the technological developments that have led to reduced meshing time and enhanced model quality at Jaguar Land Rover. Additionally he shares some thoughts on the direction of finite elements modelling, future functionalities, and new technologies which will enable further productivity gains at the company. Dr. Darren Ashby, CAE Group Leader at Jaguar Land Rover has been at the company for over 30 years, having joined as a technical apprentice and progressing to where he is now as the CAE Group Leader for Virtual Model Build and Analysis. He holds a PHD in philosophy focused in mechanical engineering from Coventry University.

Steve White looks after Altair’s UK technical support team having joined the company in 2018. In his presentation, Steve is going to give us a brief overview and demo of the HyperWorks pre- and post-processing solutions, demonstrating the intuitive user interface and efficient workflows that can lead to significant time reductions in your model build activities.

Ross Atherton is a Structural Systems Design Engineer in the Rolls-Royce Civil Aerospace Future Programmes Engineering department. After a period of supporting Rolls-Royce’s growing large engine fleet, Ross turned to future products; and has since led a small team designing, assessing, and enhancing the conceptual product architecture of future market opportunities. Ross’ presentation will go into detail on how Rolls-Royce have deployed the Altair Hyperworks toolset to enhance the structural efficiency of their UltraFan engine, covering: rapid model and mesh creation; new insights from structural optimisation and robust design; integrated post-processing; and the resulting acceleration of the engineering design iteration cycle.

Matt Bone, CFD engineer at Totalsim takes us through Totalsim's deployment of Altair’s pre-processor, which now comes equipped with a full suite of tools for CFD meshing and model set-up. We’ll see some of the automated tools can fill holes and gaps between parts and wrapping techniques to create exterior watertight meshes or cavity meshes, all built around saving you time with you CFD model build.

Julien Hoyez, Senior Application Engineer at Altair takes us through Altair’s revolutionary new composite modelling workflow, aimed at accelerating and simplifying every stage of pre-processing. Julien will show us how the dedicated Composites Browser in HyperWorks 2020’s streamlined and intuitive interface enables you to rapidly model, manipulate and review ply-based models.

Matt Kedgley from Engenuity introduces us to FiRMA, an analysis method that tackles the difficult task of predicting the structural performance of randomly oriented fibre composite components. This method has been developed and made possible using a customisation of Hypermesh. The Finite Element (FE) models are pre-processed into the FiRMA format before being submitted for analysis solve through HyperStudy.

Kenneth King is a Stress Engineer for the aerospace sector for Atkins. He’s is a chartered engineer with over 10 years’ experience in stress analysis using hand calculations and finite element analysis. While working at Atkins Aerospace he has been involved in projects on Airbus A350 and Single Aisle Aircraft. In addition to aerospace sector, he has worked in infrastructure, rail, offshore wind, nuclear and oil & gas sectors. Kenneth shows us a real life example of how Hypermesh has saved modelling time of finite element models when designing composite bridge structures. He will show us how the Hypermorph module in Hypermesh can be used to drive the design analysis cost down by reducing model creation lead time.

This presentation is by Program Manager Rob Jopson. It’s a given that the simulation models we build are intended to capture and predict physical behavior, the data used to create them is not always representative of the manufacturing process used to build the physical part. For layered composite parts in particular, this mismatch can cause significant overhead in managing the simulation data as the model is created and evolves. To solve this problem, Altair’s ply-based modeling methodology strives to maintain a 1:1 relationship between the simulation data and the manufacturing process, independent of solver. The latest developments of this methodology will be presented as a workflow in the new Composite Browser, available in HyperWorks. The recording is about 18 minutes long and was originally presented at the 2020 ATCx Composites.

This workshop on end-to-end workflow for modeling layered composites in HyperWorks was conducted by Program Manager André Möenicke. The recording is about an hour and 37 minutes long, and and was first presented at the 2020 ATCx Composites.

This workshop on molding and structural simulation of injection molded parts was conducted by Frank Ehrhart, EMEA Technical Specialist - Material Engineering/Multiscale Designer. The recording is a little over an hour long, and and was first presented at the 2020 ATCx Composites.

Variational asymptotic beam section (VABS) is a unique technology continuously funded by the US Army since 1988 and it has become a tool of choice in the helicopter and wind turbine industries for modeling composite rotor blades. With analysis of a finite element meshed cross section, VABS can compute the best set of beam properties for 1D beam analysis and also accurately recover 3D stress/strain distribution over the cross section. VABS has been integrated with HyperWorks and OptiStruct for Altair users to take advantage of this powerful technology for better design and analysis of composite beam-like structures.  The recording of the presentation by Dr. Wenbin Yu, CTO of AnalySwift, is almost 20 minutes long, and was originally presented at the 2020 ATCx Composites.

This workshop on end-to-end workflow for modeling layered composites in HyperWorks was conducted by Program Manager Rob Jopson. The recording is about an hour and 32 minutes long, and and was first presented at the 2020 ATCx Composites.

This workshop on material characterization/ virtual testing was conducted by Jeff Wollschlager, VP of Composites Technology. The recording is about an hour and 32 minutes long, and and was first presented at the 2020 ATCx Composites.

This presentation is by Markku Palanterä, Director Composites Business Development, Altair The composites design and simulation suite by Altair is actively developed with a holistic view to cover all stages of the process from material modeling all the way to the certification of composite structures. On the material modeling side, the focus is on continuous further development of Altair’s multiscale modeling technology for continuous fiber composites and injection molded plastics, but not forgetting further application areas, such as additive manufacturing. The ply-based composite modeling in Altair HyperWorks has recently undergone a major update to achieve an improved, more efficient modeling workflow. This together with planned further developments tie the modeling even better with the manufacturing to create realistic models of composite components as built. Altair’s solver technology for implicit and explicit analyses can utilize multiscale material models to accurately describe composite material nonlinear behavior up to failure. Altair’s unique composites optimization technology is being enhanced with the repeat laminate concept that provides added efficiency and user control over lay-up design. To further complement the idea of an integrated system with all the necessary composites capabilities, the Composite Stress Toolbox has been introduced in HyperWorks to support design and certification. The recording is about 22 minutes long and was originally presented at the 2020 ATCx Composites.

In this presentation, Dr Jacob Fish, Professor, Columbia University, introduces some of the key concepts and approaches in multiscale modeling, highlights recent advances aimed at developing practical multiscale tools, and survey the current landscape in multiscale modeling ranging from linking atomistic-to-continuum and continuum-to-continuum scales, physics and data-driven multiscale approaches, and applications in automotive, aerospace and biomedical industries. The recording is about 41 minutes long and was originally presented at the 2020 ATCx Composites.

This presentation is by André Mönicke, Program Manager Classical composite analysis and certification methods continue to be used in a significant share of the composite design process. In particular, applying classical methods early in design, and integrating them with finite methods as soon as possible can allow faster decisions which will be rewarded when it comes time for certification. Altair’s latest developments to respond to those needs will be presented, covering the Integrated Composite Stress Toolbox and a Certification framework available in HyperWorks. The recording is about 20 minutes long and was originally presented at the 2020 ATCx Composites.

This presentation is by Dávid Migács, R&D Engineer at CIKONI GmbH. A key design issue for new hydrogen-based vehicle drive systems is assuring safety of the start-of-the-art polymer lined, carbon fiber overwrapped vessels working at pressures over 700 bar. Cikoni will describe how a multiscale approach gives a better estimation of burst pressures and insight into damage mechanisms for different laminate layups, at both the macroscopic and micromechanical levels, to validate simulation models for structural optimization of layups, along with life predictions. The recording is about 28 minutes long and was originally presented at the 2020 ATCx Composites.

This presentation is by Dr. Tomasz Garstka and Graham Barnes, LMAT Ltd. Manufacturing induced deformations and residual stresses are an unavoidable consequence of processing composites at elevated temperatures. A number of mechanisms have been identified causing residual stresses and distortions, including mismatch in the thermal expansion, cure shrinkage of the resin, consolidation and tool-part interaction. These mechanisms usually act collectively through the curing process and may lead to severe changes in the laminate characteristic. When cured and exposed to natural environment moisture swelling, as well as subsequent stress relaxation mechanisms lead to further geometrical changes. A novel cure simulation solver is demonstrated here with the application to typical aircraft components. The recording is about 10 minutes long and was originally presented at the 2020 ATCx Composites.

By performing structural analyses on fully featured CAD assemblies within minutes, SimSolid is the game-changing simulation technology for designers, engineers, and analysts. It eliminates geometry preparation and meshing: the two most time-consuming, expertise-extensive, and error-prone tasks performed in a conventional structural simulation. Early-stage assessment of complex assemblies can be particularly challenging for CAD-based simulation tools and FEA alike, but SimSolid is tolerant of imprecise geometry, meaning no simplification of complex geometries is needed before analyzing designs. Multiple design scenarios can be simulated quickly under real-life conditions, providing the simulation power to help accelerate engineering decisions, aid development of quality products, and beat competitors to market. Tony Jones, Chief Engineer at Andron Handling, demonstrates the use of SimSolid in the design development of its bespoke mechanical equipment. Seeking to assess the strength of the welded fabrication and vertical clamping arms for both lifting and clamping loads, Andron Handling utilized SimSolid to model the entire assembly of their bespoke handler design. They were able to include details such as sliding connections, clamping force on the pistons, and matching reactions on the cylinder bodies to ensure accuracy, and complete their simulation run in less than a minute, allowing multiple design iterations to be explored.

Don-Bur are designer and manufacturers of commercial vehicle bodies such as truck trailers and develop custom trailers for many famous retailers. Their products are often highly customized to individual client requirements, ensuring speed and accuracy of their design tools is key. In this presentation Richard Owen will talk us through why they adopted SimSolid technology and show a quick hand on demo on a typical structure whilst analyzing SimSolid.

Speaker: Richard Owens, Marketing Manager, Don-Bur

Duration: 13 minutes

Rescroft are an automotive seating specialist in the UK. In this presentation João will talk about their use of SimSolid in their design process along with other tools that’s available within the Altair concept engineering suite. Speaker: João Dias, Head Of Engineering, Rescroft Duration: 22 minutes

Faraone are specialist in transparent architectures such as canapes, balustrades, staircases, glass partitions and other glass structures. Gabrielle will take us through their design teams who uses SimSolid and Altair Inspire on their structures. Speaker: Gabriele Romagnoli, Head of Structural Engineering, Faraone Duration: 18 minutes

In this presentation Carlos from NOV shares his experience with SimSolid and shows us how the technology is allowing him to very quickly assess structural performance of some very large CAD models including walkways used in Oil fields. Speaker: Carlos Omar Ramirez, PE Engineering Manager, NOV Duration: 18 minutes