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not all manufacturing processes are suitable and some parts have to be produced in a specific way. In recent years additive manufacturing, or 3D
printing, has become a hugely popular topic, not only for consumer markets but also as the next big buzz word in many sectors of engineering. Uwe Schramm said: ‘3D printing claims that
you can manufacture everything, and this is not true. Tere are manufacturing constraints for 3D printing: you generally do not get a finished product out of 3D printing; it requires some additional machining; you need to drill holes because this cannot be accomplished using the additive manufacturing process.’ Schramm continued: ‘My personal view here
is that, like materials and everything else in the world, the manufacturing techniques are going to compete with each other. He went on to give an example: ‘Casting a part a million times is going to be cheaper that using 3D printing a million times.’ Tis is largely because of the time and materials
costs associated with production, but even when the cost of metal powders for additive manufacturing have been significantly reduced, the process of layering a design will always be a time consuming when compared to some traditional manufacturing techniques such as casting or moulding.
The future of optimisation Te future of optimisation, as with many areas of the CAE chain, lies with the integration of other processes to give a more holistic simulation that combines objectives in much the same way that optimisation can now include manufacturing constraints. Altair has developed its Altair Partner Alliance
to provide a broad portfolio of specialised solutions that would not necessarily be large enough to require standalone development. However, by integrating these with the
Traditional desgin Optimisation-driven desgin
Optimised design of parts like the wings rib package shown here can result in as much as a 40 per cent mass reduction and a weight saving of more than 500kg per aircraft
HyperWorks platform, users can experience the full portfolio of Altair and its partners’ solutions through a single soſtware licence. Schramm said: ‘When the APA started we
did not have CFD technology, electromagnetic simulation, fatigue simulation, and we recognised that we need this functionality in our portfolio to do multi-disciplinary design. So we created this partner alliance to bring their soſtware in.’ In addition to the APA, Altair also seeks out
relevant technologies which are then added into the HyperWorks platform. He gave a recent example of Altair’s acquisition of Click2Cast, which aims to increase the usability of simulation soſtware for casting industry. Schramm explained that Altair choose to
acquire this company because of the specific feature that the soſtware brings in the areas of feasibility testing, which can now be included early in the deign process. ‘If you get a certain material distribution
you recover some geometry, with casting simulation you can decide “can you cast that part?”’ Schramm explained that, if there is some reason why it is not possible, then you can ‘make changes to your optimisation setup which will generate a part that is much more suitable’ to the specific manufacturing constraints imposed by that process.
Te nature of Esteco’s soſtware platform
means that it is not primarily concerned with acquisition, but much more with the effective integration of CAE tools into the modeFrontier platform. Poloni stated that the company is committed to offering as open a platform as possible to its users, from being able to use many CAD or CAE inputs but this also extends to the optimisation strategies and algorithms available for its users. Poloni said: ‘Tere is no free lunch theorem:
that means that there is no optimising strategy that is good for every single problem. As we don’t
MANUFACTURING TECHNIQUES ARE GOING TO COMPETE WITH EACH OTHER
know the answer in a specific case, we believe it is important to offer more than one option in terms of optimisation because it is a search activity.’ ‘We give to our users the ability to use different
optimisation algorithms and the ability to switch between them without any effort from the user.’ One aspect that Poloni stressed as an
area of innovation for the future is around the collaboration of different teams in the design process. ‘As soon as the process becomes more complex more people get involved ad that means that you have to have collaboration tools in place, and for that reason we are now offering the enterprise solution SOMO,’ said Poloni. He explained that this allows companies to
Combining opposing objectives and considering user-defined constraints, modeFrontier helps manage the complexity of multi-objective optimisation
40 SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING WORLD
have different development teams working on the same project. Tis would depend on the internal strategy for collaboration within a specific company: ‘Tey have to start sharing models instead of specifications,’ Poloni pointed out. Such collaboration, he concluded: ‘Will probably make the design for manufacturing possible, because you may have different individual experts in their field sharing through the modeFrontier environment.’ l
@scwmagazine l
www.scientific-computing.com
Airbus/BAE Systems
Esteco
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