New Simulation Strategies Slash Project Times and Costs

Bush Bohlman was required to perform the structural analysis and timber design for the British Columbia Institute of Technology, (BCIT), student plaza, a pedestrian and public transport user gateway for the institute. The structure needed to establish a strong campus identity with a biophilic design and demonstrable support for sustainable building practices while ensuring structural safety according to local design codes. The hybrid mass timber structure consists of a Cross-Laminated Timber (CLT) canopy, CLT columns, and steel columns. By using S-TIMBER, the engineers were able to simulate the complex two-way bending behavior of the cantilevering roof panels and asymmetrical column layout. Having the model in S-TIMBER allowed for changes to be analyzed and re-designed, without the need to manually design individual timber and steel elements. S-TIMBER's design reports presented the design calculations concisely, yet transparently, for faster and easier reviews.

Trèves Products Services & Innovation in France is one of the leading Tier-1 suppliers of noise, vibration, and harshness (NVH) reduction parts, providing full sound packages for the trunk, body, interior, and powertrain. To best meet their customer expectations, where possible, Trèves reduces part design and lead time by replacing expensive and time-consuming physical testing with numerical modeling. Traditionally, such models need real parts to account for their multi-layer arrangement and varying thickness, with readily available input parameters. They also need to be comprehensive in scope and easy to implement. Available via the Altair Partner Alliance (APA), AlphaCell from Matelys-Research Lab offers several features that meets Trèves’ needs, and have helped position Trèves to provide robust solutions to OEMs in order to achieve the next generation of pass-by noise limits.

Sheet metal stamping is fundamental to the automotive manufacturing industry. A vast array of different tool, die, and process combinations are employed to create an equally diverse array of components. Traditionally, identifying the optimum approach for each part has been a labor intensive and time-consuming task that requires engineering teams with high levels of skill and experience. This case study demonstrates how Altair Knowledge Studio, a general-purpose data analytics tool, can enable engineering managers and data analysts to deliver clear and quantifiable benefits in the manufacturing domain. For Ford, this is reflected in dramatic improvements in the speed and efficiency with which the best possible sheet metal stamping processes were selected.

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.

Jyoti CNC Automation Ltd. designs and manufactures a wide array of CNC Machines for metal cutting industries. They utilized Altair HyperMesh to optimize the existing design and improve static stiffness of their machines, and Altair HyperWorks to reach the optimized design and arrangement. Altair OptiStruct solver was then used to validate the effectiveness of the optimized product design. The result was an immense benefit in terms of resources and cost saved as mechanical accuracies were ensured right at the stage of the FEA software level, without having to create the physical prototype.

ArcelorMittal is the world’s leading steel and mining company, with a presence in 60 countries and primary steelmaking facilities in 17 countries employing more than 190,000 people. In a recent project, a large-scale charging chute of a sinter cooler plant in Fos-Sur-Mer had to be optimized by the ArcelorMittal R&D team to improve the reliability and efficiency of this device. The objective was to identify a better and more feasible design that improved granular segregation, abrasion, and mechanical resistance. ArcelorMittal R&D used the high-performance software for granular material simulation EDEM to simulate and analyze the granular flows in the charging chute. Providing pre-calibrated material models, EDEM enabled the engineers to create and calibrate their EDEM model to match the physical experiments. The DEM simulation provided valuable insight into the granular flow in the charging chute and segregation patterns, which is difficult and sometimes impossible to measure in experiments.

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.

Urwahn Engineering GmbH is a startup in the biking sector. While bikes must meet many requirements to pass globally recognized test and load case scenarios according to DIN ISO 4210 safety standards, they must also be light to reduce raw material usage and create the best possible user experience. For this aim, simulation has always played a key role at Urwahn, a team that strives to maximize functionality and performance by using state-of-the-art tools. Under the Altair Startup program, Urwahn received access to Altair® Inspire™. To meet the DIN ISO 4210’s safety requirements, they simulated five load cases on the steel frame structure, studied the behavior of the single 3D-printed parts, and explored the impact of the material distribution on the overall system behavior. Inspire’s integrated topology optimization solver enabled Urwahn to push the material usage limit, reducing weight and costs while keeping stiffness and other boundary conditions on target.

Founded in 1961, STARCO develops and delivers high-quality wheel and tire solutions to the European market. Since 2017, STARCO has been part of the KENDA Group, one of the world’s major tire and tube manufacturers, with a workforce of over 12,000 employees and sites all over the world. Developing wheels has always been a big engineering task – manufacturers have to meet high performance targets while also meeting budget, material, and environmental requirements – a difficult, time-consuming challenge for engineers today is the model setup. To solve some of these challenges STARCO turned to Altair, who provided a solution: Altair® HyperWorks® is a high-performance finite-element pre-processor that provides a highly interactive and visual environment to analyze product design performance, offering direct interfaces to commercial CAD and CAE systems and a rich suite of easy-to-use tools to build and edit CAE models.

Established in the early 1990s and headquartered in Gemlik, Borçelik is the highest quality galvanized steel producer, with the largest production capacity in Turkey. They are engaged in manufacturing hot dip galvanized steel, cold-rolled steel and hot-rolled (pickled and oiled) steel groups, all of which are industrial raw material inputs. Reducing emissions and fuel consumption drives the development of advanced materials and production processes in the automotive industry. Fuel efficiency relies on the successful design of vehicles and developing technologies that reduce the weight of vehicle body structure. There is always a need for research and development to maintain passenger safety while reducing the mass of the vehicle structure. A study was conducted to investigate the ductile fracture behavior of the high-strength galvanized flat steel that forms a vehicle body structure. To reduce the analysis calculation time, mass scaling was applied using the /DT/NODA/CST option which controls the nodal time step, and reduced the simulation time by nearly 50%. In terms of quality-related challenges, Borçelik saved nearly 10% of scrap material, and reduced costs by 5% after working with the design of experiments and applying numerical calculations through Altair simulation solutions.

Casted parts need to meet rigorous quality, safety and performance standards, but the traditional approach which relies on the past experience of specialist metallurgists, can results in expensive trial and error practices. Hadleigh Castings wanted to explore the potential of a simulation approach to their methods development to build a more future proof process, less reliant on individual experiences. By adopting Altair Inspire Cast, Hadleigh Castings is now able to experiment with the methods prior to manufacture, identify common casting defects and rectify them ahead of any physical molds being created. Since adopting the technology, the company now has a 100% record of getting their castings right first time, with simulation now a standard part of Hadleigh Castings services, even supplying clients with simulation reports as part of their services. Inspire Cast has enabled the company to minimize raw material wastage, and reduce the cost of its methods development.

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.

Global Bank Visualizes Real-Time Trading Activity with Altair The client is a global bank that offers a full range of wealth management, retail banking, and commercial banking services. It operates in more than 60 countries, has more than 200,000 employees, and has assets of about $3 trillion. Its commercial banking services positions it among the ten largest investment banks in the world and it provides both buy-side and sell-side services to individual and institutional clients. Its trading operations deal in equities, credit, rates, currency, commodities, and their derivatives.

Sika is a specialty chemicals company, and a leader in developing and producing systems and products for bonding, sealing, damping, reinforcing, and protecting in the building sector and automotive industry. Offering a wide range of BIW noise reduction and vibration damping solutions and addressing problems encountered in automotive development, Sika is a key development partner for OEMs and suppliers. Sika’s structural systems team focuses on solutions reinforcing the customer’s BIW and NVH issues. Using the Altair design space workflow, Sika engineers eliminated time-consuming steps in their workflow. This let them make faster decisions - instead of hours in the prior standard workflow, it now only takes minutes. Modeling time was reduced by 70%, giving the team to spend more time gaining a deeper knowledge of the part and its improvement. Sika won the 2018 Altair Enlighten Award with its ultra-lightweight constrained layer material composite for structure-borne noise reduction.

For more than 60 years, L&L Products have been providing unique solutions to the automotive industry. L&L Products Composite Body Solutions (CBS™) structural reinforcement technology is commonly used to enhance overall body-in-white (BIW) stiffness, other benefits include load path management, section integrity, light-weighting, increased durability, while having no impact in body shop practices. CBS™ aims to deliver an efficient solution for both current and future-ready applications requiring lightweighting. L&L Products reduced their concept topology optimization model build times by 80% by using the Altair® HyperWorks® Local Design Space workflow. The ability to create models more efficiently provides a mechanism to arrive at an optimal solution quickly, streamlines in-house processes removing the dependency on other teams, and provides an opportunity to explore more design variants to arrive at a truly optimal solution.

AI improves customer service and product quality for white goods manufacturer. Mabe manufactures home appliances, including stoves, refrigerators, washing machines, dryers, water purifiers, and more. The company is based in Mexico City and markets its white goods under its own brand as well as several others, including GE Appliances, in more than 70 countries. Mabe is an early leader in the development of connected products that allow its customer service personnel to monitor the health of its appliances in the field. Altair has been at the center of Mabe’s product development process for years, and Mabe is now working with Altair to deploy and enhance its connected products strategy. Learn more - click here to hear Martin Ortega, Senior Design Engineer at Mabe, explain how they are harnessing the power of big data, AI and simulation to accelerate product innovation.

The Electric Storage Company is a Northern Ireland-based firm that manages electric power in households from renewable sources using battery storage and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies. The company installs smart batteries in homes and communities, along with sophisticated management software that lets homeowners sell excess energy back to grid operators when prices are high and helps them maintain the lowest possible energy input costs. Managing varieties of base load and intermittent renewable power sources requires the ability to ingest, process, and analyze high frequency information emanating from the grid and thousands of devices. The company needs real-time insight into energy markets, the grid, battery systems, and generation facilities, as well as customer-level power consumption patterns. Understanding consumption and generation trends optimizes power routing and battery storage and ensures that power sold back to the grid or on the open market is fetching the best possible price.

RF2B is a wireless design services company offering custom antenna design and validation services across air interfaces and bands. RF2B developed a phased array antenna proof of concept design for small cell Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) base stations at 3.5GHz for its customer Menlo Micro, who develops high performance RF MEMS switch integrated circuits. Menlo Micro developed a reference design for 3.5GHz MEMS Based Differential Delay Shifter (DDS) using its RF switches that can be a great building block for electronically scanning antenna array in place of traditional phase shifters, which are band limited as well as expensive. Altair Feko comes with a feature called finite array analysis, plus a built-in script that synthesizes the antenna array. These features significantly sped up the high-level trade off analysis due to model building acceleration and lower memory consumption leading to much quicker simulation times, which is critical during the high-level design phase.

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.

The demand for biomass briquetting is steadily increasing since the use of brown coal fuel will be dramatically reduced to meet CO2 emission targets in the near future. Many big plants across Europe will stop producing brown coal briquettes by the end of 2022. To address this trend and growing demand for alternative fuel options, ATNA set out to develop a new generation of briquetting presses. ATNA’s goal was to design an improved hydraulic press which can achieve the high throughput of a roller press while delivering a high briquette quality. ATNA implemented Altair SimSolid® under the global Altair Startup program, tailored to the needs of high-tech startups offering access to all types of simulation, high-performance computing, and artificial intelligence solutions at an affordable price. With Altair SimSolid’s meshless simulation ATNA was efficiently able to study many variants thanks to the reduced modeling time and incredible computational speed of SimSolid. With SimSolid ATNA needed 60% less time to customize, simulated 80% more subassemblies and used 15% less material.

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.

Banks, hedge funds, asset managers, and other financial firms use FlexTrade software to reduce their trading costs, increase their trading velocity, and increase the profitability of their trading operations while maintaining compliance with all applicable banking laws and regulations.

Serba Dinamik is an engineering company specializing in operations and maintenance (O&M), engineering, procurement, construction and commissioning (EPCC), and IT solutions for energy exploration and production firms. Their team worked with Altair to develop a Smart Predictive Maintenance Data System (SPMDS) utilizing Knowledge Studio and Panopticon. Maintenance crews use Panopticon-powered dashboards built into SPMDS to monitor every sensor mounted on operating turbines in real time. AI models built with Knowledge Studio identify potential failures or issues that require engineering attention, and, based on that understanding, take turbines offline only when necessary.

While rail is the most environmentally friendly means of transport, freight trains today do not look much different than those from the past. To reach the climate and energy targets of the European Union while achieving higher payloads and a better ROI, the railway sector needs an innovation boost to build more efficient and sustainable rail freight wagons. TransAnt GmbH, a joint venture with ÖBB Rail Cargo Group and voestalpine Steel Division, was established to bring more efficient and sustainable rail freight solutions to the market. With its innovative concept based on modularity and lightweight design, once operational the company seeks to revolutionize the market as a full supplier of freight wagons. The company used Altair® HyperWorks® for topology optimization – in particular Altair® HyperMesh® – to realize the transition to a weldable structure, Altair® HyperView® for pre- and post-processing, and Altair® OptiStruct® for FEA (including local buckling) and optimization.

Vortex Bladeless, a Spanish technology startup company developing an aerogenerator with no blades, leverages Altair® SmartWorks™ IoT to advance product designs. Hear how the Vortex team is using an IoT monitoring board and a digital twin to accelerate the development process while continuously improving product performance. Try SmartWorks IoT today, for free - click here to start trial.

Unmanned aerial systems (UAS) are a rapidly evolving technology and used for a variety of civil and military purposes. To ensure airworthiness, UAS manufacturers rely on advanced simulation and manufacturing techniques to create efficient designs. Aerial systems active throughout Europe and operating with diverse payloads for different missions require a reliable vehicle architecture and fuel supply. To ensure perfectly tuned architecture and a lightweight design while increasing stiffness and strength, Schiebel used Altair solutions in combination with 3D printing. The engineers performed various simulations to optimize the design of AM engine parts. Using Altair’s topology optimization structural design tool, Schiebel reduced the weight significantly while maintaining high stiffness. Subsequently, the system was evaluated by laminar and turbulent flow simulation as well as conjugate heat transfer simulation using Altair CFD™. Contacts, NLFE and complex dynamic systems were modeled with Altair® MotionView® and Altair® MotionSolve®. Schiebel also took advantage of APA solutions.

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.

Süddeutsche Gelenkscheibenfabrik (SGF) was tasked with assessing the fatigue strength of an elastic coupling under rotating loads according to the FKM guideline. Learn how using S-Life FKM by PART Engineering, available through the Altair Partner Alliance, helped SGF reduce simulation time and lower the possibility of errors and misinterpretation of results.

Toggled iQ combines web application, mobile application, hardware, analytics, and edge computing to create a one-of-a-kind smart building data and device management system. This smart-lighting manufacturer wanted to develop a new, connected lighting and building management solution to help their customers save money, improve comfort, and comply with new regulations. They used Altair® SmartWorks™ IoT to build a complete front end, back end, and edge compute architecture. With this, Toggled’s customers can now manage users, onboard devices, manage compute workloads in their gateway product, develop building automation, and optimize energy usage. Try SmartWorks IoT today, for free - click here to start trial.

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.

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%.

Streamlining data preparation with Altair Monarch enables Client Engineering Services to speed up accounts receivable process by 90% while improving accuracy.

In order to compete in the fast-paced retail industry, a chain of more than 100 sporting goods stores operating across the United States needed a more efficient and accurate method for preparing and analyzing data to enable management teams to quickly make strategic operational decisions.

In an effort to increase transportation safety, today’s bus rollover and crash test regulations have become more stringent. To ensure all products achieve the requisite safety regulations, Gemilang set up dedicated in-house testing facilities, including a tilt test platform to assess the stability of the vehicle, and a rollover test platform to ensure bus safety in the event of a rollover accident. Gemilang decided to leverage computer-aided engineering (CAE) simulation technologies to facilitate the bus rollover assessment during the early stage of product development and selected Altair as its technology partner.

Etteplan offers engineering solutions to the world’s leading manufacturing companies for industrial equipment and plant engineering. Etteplan’s client Wärtsilä were looking to redesign their valve spring press tools used for mounting cylinder head valves. Altair OptiStruct™ and Altair Inspire™ were used to run topology optimization and finite element analyses to create design concepts, and Additive Works’ Amphyon software simulated the print process. This resulted in Etteplan’s additive manufacturing press tool design being ready to be printed within one week from when the project starting data was frozen.

As an institute of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) is the high-performance computing center for Munich’s top universities and research institutions in Germany and Europe. Altair provides and installs NVIDIA’s DGX systems and infrastructure at the LRZ and at customer sites. To meet the special needs of best-in-class AI and ML research at the Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML), the Altair team had to design a cluster solution that provides strong nodes and big capacity to train a multitude of networks, and is able to develop highly scalable ML and AI applications. Thanks to Altair’s expertise in the parallelization of GPU applications the team was able to develop, prepare, and install a highly scalable system consisting of eight DGX A100 systems combined to a powerful cluster called DGX POD, while ensuring continuous power supply and the necessary cooling of the cluster.

IBUKI Inc., a mold development and manufacturing company introduced CADdoctor to check data quality, repair, and translate 3D CAD data provided by their customers. The CAD data repair time for engineers has been significantly reduced since the introduction of CADdoctor, and the CADdoctor became an important tool for their efficient mold development phase.

MOTO-MAQLAB-UC3M was founded in 2010 by students at Carlos III University in Madrid, Spain, to develop a racing motorcycle for the international MotoStudent competition. MotoStudent is an international event held every two years at the MotorLand, Aragon circuit and welcomes university teams from all over the world. The MOTO-MAQLAB-UC3M team won awards in several categories of the fourth MotoStudent edition. Inspired by their successful participation, the students wanted to further develop and improve their race bike designs to repeat or exceed these results. In order to improve their results, the MOTO-MAQLAB-UC3M team needed to reduce the mass in the cycle parts of the bike. Altair solutions enabled the MOTO-MAQLAB-UC3M team to approximate the ideal number of layers, their shape, order, and direction. Mass reduction of 30% was achieved while maintaining the original stiffness.

As an IP design and licensing company, time-to-market and engineering efficiency are CEVA’s most critical and valued metrics. With this in mind, the team at CEVA selected the Altair Accelerator™ job scheduler for their VLSI workflows.