Simulation-Driven Design of a Portable Basketball Hoop System - Initial Steps

Product engineers are under consistent pressure to reduce the costs, improve the quality and increase the throughput of manufacturing processes. This fast-paced environment is not well suited for trial-and-error manufacturing engineering. How are engineers responding to these challenges? Is simulation and simulation-driven design for manufacturing (SDfM) well established across the industry? When simulation is deployed, does it deliver on the promises of reducing costs while improving throughput and quality? And what are the barriers to the adoption of simulation during the early stages of product development? In this 2021 survey report conducted by Engineering.com, we discuss those questions and discover: • Top design priorities • Top benefits of SDfM • Top barriers to expanding and adopting SDfM • Risks to staying competitive in the market

Heavy equipment manufacturers want to design products that are durable and perform at their peak under a variety of conditions. To accomplish this, Altair provides an integrated multi-disciplinary simulation environment to virtually test and optimize equipment performance and therefore, help reduce design and development costs. Using simulation-driven design, studying the full dynamics of a product or system is possible, from motion analysis to complete lifecycle durability testing.

A key development goal of any machine-building project is to produce perfectly running, reliable machines that make high-quality products. By leveraging accurate virtual prototypes, seamless production can be ensured earlier in the development process to help assess and improve product profitability.

Investment casting is a valued manufacturing process known for its ability to produce detailed components with accuracy, repeatability, and in a variety of different metals, waxes, and high-performance alloys. Producing high-quality casted components is less prone to common design errors when a simulation-driven approach is used, leading to easier, more accurate analysis and optimization during the design phase.

The Additive Manufacturing for Production survey conducted by TCT Magazine in association with Altair set out to understand the community’s desire and readiness for the much-promised land of series production using additive technologies. This collaboration between TCT and Altair was designed to understand the needs of the community in terms of current production capabilities, rate-limiting steps and areas of the technology that they believe needs improvement.

This special report by engineering.com covers two of the most talked-about trends in the product design community today: Generative Design and Topology Optimization. These simulation techniques allow customers to design lightweight and performative parts using a simulation-driven design approach.

A company specializing in 3D printing relies on simulation to make tools for injection molding that are less expensive, lighter and better than those created with traditional methods.

Oftentimes, in the design of a casting, suboptimal structural concepts are developed which at the same time are not castable, requiring multiple and time-consuming design iterations. This paper describes a process to generate both structurally efficient and also castable parts, while reducing the overall design cycle time. The optimal structure is determined by topology optimization, reducing component mass while maintaining performance requirements. This step is followed by a design smoothing operation and then by a casting simulation to check for casting defects. To demonstrate this software driven product design and process validation, solidThinking Inspire® is used to develop the concept design and Click2Cast® for casting process validation.

Additive manufacturing coupled with topology optimization allows the design-and-analysis and manufacturing iterations to be reduced significantly, or even eliminated. To ensure that the part will perform as simulated, a mid-stage validation is conducted on a standardized part before creating the final products.

Development tools and methods, such as simulation, are increasingly important to face and address the pressure of innovation. As an example, for successful new design methods and to show how simulation tools are used, Altair developed a virtual demonstrator based on a cobot application. This complex machine interacts with a human operator as the ultimate smart manufacturing equipment - to show how challenges in modern product design can be overcome.

When developing mobile machines, manufacturer focus is twofold: 1) Increasing a machine’s productivity and operator comfort 2) Improving its energy efficiency. To achieve these objectives, it is crucial to have an optimized system-of-systems and seamless interaction between subsystems. But how can manufacturers design components from varied disciplines like mechanics, electronics, and hydraulics to create a holistic overall system having optimal performance? The answer is digital transformation.