| Computer aided engineering (CAE) is traditionally regarded as a tool to enhance and refine the design process, resulting in an improved product – lighter, stronger, cheaper. But Altair Engineering thinks it should go further: that CAE should drive design, and take optimised concepts back into CAD.
The company’s latest release, Hyperworks 8.0, includes revised structural optimisation technology, finite element analysis (FEA) pre- and post-processors, a basic FEA solver, a multi-body dynamics solver, a 3D results plotting environment, a suite of manufacturing simulation tools, and data management. This is a long way from Altair’s first CAE tool: the Hypermesh pre-processor for FE, now one of the most commonly used software products in the automotive industry and often combined with MSC’s Nastran solver.
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Hyperview gets new GUI |
Hyperworks has been around since 1999 and is now on release 8.0. Altair sees the package as providing open, high-end product design within a common environment. It can import data from most leading CAD packages and will export to almost all solvers.
The CAE market is expanding and fragmented. Altair’s vice president engineering software Jeff Brennan sees breadth as an asset: “We have more than just software in our business. Only recently did the software side of our business exceed the revenues from the services side, and the interplay between those is a differentiator.”
Growing competition
Altair has done well in the automotive industry with Hypermesh, but competition is now coming from several directions. Many CAD packages are bundled with their own meshing software and FEA tools. Brennan said: “It’s a highly competitive environment. We see competition from the smaller players; the CAD tool providers who try to integrate FEA – meshing through to simulation – and some are very good. For some of the engineer’s needs, it suffices. As the needs of the organisation advance, the need for high-end functionality advances: to have high end analyses; to have best in class tools, as opposed to good enough tools. You can’t do everything with one piece of software.”
Given the number of vendors in the CAE sector, offering a plethora of design tools, levels of compatibility are high. “We have competitive overlap with many companies in the space yet we are still able to get along. Usually it’s customers who drive the need for these relationships: they choose us as best in class tool for modelling or visualisation or optimisation.”
Motionsolve is a dynamics simulation tool within Hyperworks that models multi body dynamics (MBD) within the linear range. As a solver, it broadens the functionality offered by the package but in so doing, comes into competition with established, specialised dynamics software such as Adams.
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Multi body dynamics using Motionsolve |
Michael Hoffman, MBD specialist for business development of Altair Europe, says this is the target, but the group has to be realistic. “Our aim in the short term is to come up with a complete modelling environment: we provide the user the means by which he can model MBD as well as FE components. It’s then up to them whether they want to use our motion solver or Adams. OEMs want to reduce the number of vendors but always want a choice of at least two. The cost-benefit will decide.”
Expansion and development of CAE has led to improvements in product design and reduced time to market. But Brennan believes that the traditional method of deploying CAE is not the most efficient. He explains: “Downstream optimisation is when you use the software in a loop to solve a problem by making changes to an existing design.”
Implementing CAE at the beginning of the design process; to start with optimised concepts, is Altair’s view of best-practice.Brennan said that this was behind Optistruct: “It was the first commercially available software to grow the shape of brackets. CAE is the driver of the design process: Optistruct wasn’t about taking a design and modifying it, it was a technology to introduce a method of creating the structural shape from scratch.”
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Optimised design solution using Optistruct |
Increased functionality in CAE comes with increased cost, both in terms of licences and user training. Brennan believes that the cost of CAE software is very small compared to the gain, certainly much less expensive than physical testing or failures leading to redesign.
But will simulation displace real testing as a means of verifying design? Brennan says there has been a definite decline in physical testing. “The Holy Grail is to do no tests but I think a reasonable goal is to do few tests, or one test.
“Can we develop better simulations? Absolutely: the market is still growing.” But there are limits to how far simulation can go: “It depends on the industry. Where human lives are at stake? No. In other respects? Absolutely.” |
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