Simulation Fosters Stronger Customer Collaboration and Develops New Business

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.

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.

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.

The idea for its cooling technology for electric motor systems was born at high-tech start-up Dynamic E flow (DEF), when the founders first experienced an overheated engine of an electrical car. The existent development process at DEF used analytical methods and physical testing to confirm results. With increasing customization, that process was not flexible enough to handle various design possibilities. With the need for a simulative design approach, DEF employed Altair software to tackle its multi-physical design challenges, and to meet all the customer requirements for their unique motors, test hundreds of variants, and to check the feasibility of the customized product.

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.

In 2019, engineers at Schneider Electric’s R&D center in Mexico took on a project to study the dynamic performance of a microgenerator designed to power a wireless communication card for lighting switches by self-harvesting energy. However, to achieve a successful design, particular consideration needed to be given to operating temperature specifications. Differing operating conditions had to be explored to determine the energy performance of the generator. A fully integrated, multi-physics toolkit was achieved by complementing Altair Flux with Altair Activate™, Altair Compose™, and Altair HyperStudy™. The flexibility and capability of these tools had a dramatic effect not only on the performance outcome, but also the speed with which results were obtained. Moreover, robust risk management was assured, with effective simulation and optimization preventing engineers from heading in the wrong direction, or building prototypes that did not meet the desired objectives.

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.