Optimising industry


Robert Roe looks at the latest simulation techniques


used in the design of industrial and commercial vehicles


T


he use of simulation soſtware for validation and testing is a well established process for many engineering companies – but


advances in soſtware, combined with increased pressure from competition and regulatory requirements, are driving simulation earlier into the design and concept stages of new product development. Simulation during the design phase of


product development gives engineers the ability to adapt and react to problems much earlier. Te benefit of this is more reliable validation, reduced costs and development times, and better-performing products. Bipin Patel, managing director


of EnginSoſt UK, explains that optimisation is a particularly useful tool for design simulation as it increases the number of product iterations that can be analysed. ‘If you can test lots of scenarios virtually, then you know that you have accounted for any possibility of it failing,’ stated Patel. He explained that, today, the majority of


engineers would not start a new development project without understanding how it is going to perform: ‘Tose that are still doing that are probably over engineering. Tey have put additional safety factors in to compensate for the fact that they don’t actually know what is going to happen.’


Modularisation Dassault Systèmes, the soſtware provider behind the 3DExperience platform, offers modularisation as a standard out-of-


24 SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING WORLD EDAG has been using Altair software since the early 1990s


the-box solution as part of its Truck and Bus Tailors industry solution experience. Philippe Delanoye, industry solution experience director, explained that this is similar to soſtware used in transportation and mobility, which provides capabilities to configure an entire vehicle based on modular configurations. Delanoye commented that this concept


aims to reduce the amount of engineering to order (ETO) in order to reduce product development times and costs: ‘ETO is where you engineer many parts based on a customer requirement. Tis requires you to redo the engineering every time.’ Te alternative, configure to order (CTO),


allows users to ‘define configurations based on what you have designed on previous projects – allowing users to reduce engineering as they can make use of previous designs or design something new depending on the project requirements, said Delanoye. ‘We configure the vehicle just like when


you go and buy a normal vehicle,’ continued Delanoye. ‘Let’s say 80 per cent of what you


want is available out of the box through configuration and then you want to add something specific to you as a customer, so there is still the remaining part of ETO.’ Michael Lalande, Dassault Systèmes’


director for Americas transportation and mobility, commented that the reason behind some of the major vehicle manufacturers going to modularisation is that it allows them to re-use material that has already been validated in previous projects: ‘Tey have already tested and validated that specific model and they just have to assure that, when they plug that module into the new vehicle, it meets the new requirements. In most cases all the components within that module have already been validated.’


Optimising industrial and commercial vehicles Optimisation is an increasingly popular tool for many engineering projects as it allows engineers to set up performance characteristics, load cases and a limit to the physical dimensions of a part, and the


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