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Toyota Motorsport GmbH (TMG) utilizes a variety of development software across its departments, including CAE, CAD, and others. These software tools are essential for the engineers' daily work and are retrieved from a large software license pool within the company. However, managing this process efficiently became a challenge for the TMG IT department. They needed a system to monitor software license usage to understand when and how often each license was used. This information was crucial for the management team to understand the actual demand for software within the company, identify areas where licenses were needed, and determine if the company owned more licenses of a certain software type than actually required.

The National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) in Australia operates Raijin, the largest supercomputer in the Southern Hemisphere. The supercomputer handles a wide spectrum of job types, varying in scale and completion time. The challenge was to ensure overall system balance, scalable performance, and a high-quality user experience. The architecture and subsystems needed to scale as the software and hardware scale out, to protect application performance. NCI needed a highly scalable, flexible, and reliable product that could handle both the size and complexity of its computing requirements. NCI previously operated an in-house OpenPBS system with a locally customized scheduler and associated accounting system to manage its resources. However, maintaining the development and support for this system was becoming increasingly difficult, leading NCI to investigate new options for Raijin’s workload manager.

American Railcar Industries, a leading manufacturer of commercial railroad cars, was facing a significant challenge in modifying railcar designs. The company had to design state-of-the-art cars while considering the specific materials to be transported. For instance, designing a car to transport chlorine, a highly corrosive substance, required a robust design that complied with federal and state regulations. The company also had to ensure that the railcar was cost-competitive, which meant developing the least costly design that provided high levels of efficiency. The company had been using finite element analysis software for many years, but the limitations of that software had begun to slow their innovation processes. The company maintains base models for various types of cars, but each customer requires modifications to tailor the cars for the specific cargos they will carry. As a result, engineers had to re-run the model for different load cases. The company was also projecting an increase in projects involving structural dynamics, which were previously contracted out due to the lack of appropriate software.

Unilever's Global Packaging Design Group was faced with the challenge of identifying potential packaging issues early in the design process. The discovery of problems after manufacturing had begun could lead to costly impacts, sometimes necessitating modifications in the tools used during production. This made the design process time-consuming as designers had to consider a wide range of possible issues. The group used simulation to validate potential designs and ensure they could be produced. However, outsourcing the simulation work was considered, which would require an average of two months to develop and carry out the appropriate testing.

The National Supercomputing Center IT4Innovations, a research institute at the VŠB - Technical University of Ostrava (VŠBTUO) in the Czech Republic, was faced with the challenge of supporting the needs of a massive supercomputing system with a large, diverse user base. The supercomputer, being built in two parts, was expected to be one of the 100 most powerful supercomputers in the world upon completion in 2015. The Center had six research directions dealing with a wide variety of computational problems, including real-time traffic analysis/management, flood modeling/predictions, air pollution modeling/preventions, molecular dynamics simulations, and modeling of new materials. Given the wide variety of users and applications, IT4I realized they needed a reliable, high-performing workload management product for the Supercomputing Center’s users. The procurement procedure demanded an advanced job scheduler and resource manager along with advanced tools for utilization analysis.

Polaris, a renowned manufacturer of snowmobiles, was faced with the challenge of reducing iterations while optimizing designs for their snowmobile structures. The Snowmobile Chassis Structures Group, responsible for design and testing, supports three different platform teams with chassis solutions for each set of requirements. The team relied heavily on computer-based design and finite element (FE) analysis in their development process. However, the existing tools were not efficient enough to meet their optimization goals. The team needed a solution that would not only help them achieve their weight reduction goals without compromising on performance but also reduce the time and effort required to complete the optimization of new snowmobile structure designs.

Evenflo, a global leader in the development of innovative infant equipment, was faced with the challenge of making child safety simple with innovative and easy-to-use products. The company aimed to achieve this through a combination of engineering and industrial design. The key consideration in the design process was safety, but ease of use and cost control were also important factors. The immediate challenge was to redesign a car seat release handle, a crucial part that secures the seat shell to a seat base or a stroller. The goal of the redesign was to improve the styling and maintain the ease of use while maintaining or reducing the cost relative to the current part.

Suzhou Samsung Electronics Co., a Korean-Chinese joint venture that develops and produces major home appliances, was facing a challenge with its refrigerator door covers. The company was considering changing the composition of its refrigerator door covers for certain models to reduce costs. Traditionally, ABS engineering plastic was used to create the upper and lower door covers. However, for cost control, the company sought to use high-impact polystyrene, or HIPS, instead of ABS for the injection-molded covers. Unfortunately, during physical reliability testing, the HIPS covers cracked during the temperature cycling process. The cracking was observed in the middle of the door cover’s top surface, beginning at the front edge of the door cover. The engineers at Suzhou Samsung performed an analysis of the material, structure, and injection-molding process to identify the cause of the cracking. They found that the change in material was one factor contributing to the cracking issue.

Lenovo, a leading multinational technology company, was facing intense competition in the computer industry, which necessitated continuous cost reduction, improved product quality and reliability, and shortened product development cycles. The traditional product development methodology was no longer efficient for rapid time to market. Lenovo sought to use computer-aided engineering (CAE) tools for optimizing performance in the initial product design phase to simulate and evaluate its products’ mechanical behavior under loads like impact and vibration. However, engineers were spending 80 percent of their time on pre-processing tasks in the simulation process. The pre-processing tools provided by some CAE software offerings were not strong enough to meet the manufacturer’s requirements, and the quality of the pre-processing mesh was not dependable. Lenovo needed a powerful pre-processing tool that would meet the demands of scientific research and engineering innovation.

Suzhou Samsung Electronics Co., a joint venture between Korean and Chinese companies, has been focusing on optimizing the design of a belt pulley for one of its washing machines. The belt pulley, an essential component of a drum washing machine, was traditionally constructed from cast aluminum. However, with increasing cost pressures, the company sought to reduce the pulley’s weight by optimizing its design and/or using new materials for its production. The challenge was to consider alternative materials, taking into account both their performance and cost. To meet these challenges, Suzhou Samsung decided to employ topology optimization.

Clemson University's IT department, Clemson Computing and Information Technology (CCIT), was facing a significant challenge in managing the workload of their rapidly growing user base. The department utilized the Palmetto cluster, a 17,032-core, 262 TFlop HPC system, as the university's primary HPC resource. This system was heavily used by the university's faculty, staff, students, and 144 external users, including researchers and faculty from other universities. The cluster operated on a 'condo model', where users could purchase nodes for their own priority usage. However, the open-source Maui scheduler previously used by CCIT was unable to handle the scalability and reliability needs of their expanding user base. The system frequently crashed and some advanced features did not function properly, leading to unreliability with the scheduler.

BASF Engineering Plastics, a division of the world's leading chemical company, BASF, is tasked with providing superior engineering design, simulation, and testing support during all phases of the development cycle. The group's primary goal is to provide superior engineering design, simulation, and testing support during all phases of the development cycle. However, the support of various customers in the application of modern materials often demands new concepts that make the advantages of the material applicable. This challenge is further compounded by the need to continually develop modern virtual methods to meet the needs of its customers, as the company believes that mathematical part optimization will broadly gain acceptance as the method of choice in the next few years.

Dana Holding Corporation, a global leader in driveline, sealing, and thermal management technologies, faced a significant challenge in their product development process. The traditional method of transforming CAD designs into prototypes, analyzing the prototype for failure points, redesigning the prototype, and retesting until the product met specifications was proving to be time-consuming and costly. Particularly, the pre-processing for models of cylinder heads and engine blocks required the geometry to be imported from CAD and then cleaned up by engineers, a task that could take anywhere from one to four days. To speed up the design cycle, Dana decided to implement a 'first-time-right' design methodology, where analysis would be conducted before building a prototype. This new process demanded a faster way to pre-process simulation models.

Korg Italy, a subsidiary of the Japanese Korg corporation, specializes in the design and production of high-end digital pianos and electronic keyboards. The company faced a significant challenge in creating these sophisticated musical instruments that required accommodating intricate circuits and mechanisms while maintaining style and elegance. The design process often involved modifications to the internal component design during the product development process. These changes were often necessitated when engineers discovered that an electrical component was of a different size than initially envisaged. Making such alterations at an advanced stage in the product development cycle could lead to considerable costs. Furthermore, the company also had to manage the design of the packaging and cases for these instruments.

Bros Manifatture, a leading maker of handcrafted watch straps and high-quality products since the late 1970s, faced a significant challenge in reducing the time-to-market for over 200 new products created each year. The company, which expanded into the production of steel fashion jewelry and watches, needed to offer flexibility and accuracy to its designers. The market of fashion watches and jewelry demands the introduction of new models each year, necessitating a continual search for fresh and novel ideas. The company's rapid growth, from 18 to 24 million euros in 2007, led to the creation of a Styling Centre to foster new talents internally. However, with dozens of new jewelry and watch models launched each year, it was crucial that the software tools adopted not only expedite the time-to-market of products but also stimulate and liberate the creativity of the designers.

Novellini, a leading European company in the bathroom products industry, faced the challenge of quickly developing and upgrading a wide range of medium and high-end bathroom products. The company, which started as a small artisanal company in the 1970s, has grown and expanded its product range to include shower enclosures, mosquito screens, whirlpools, complete enclosures, equipped shower panels, shower pans, and towel radiators. With an annual production of more than 1.3 million units, Novellini needed to continuously upgrade its product lines, which are distinguished by superior construction quality and design. The company also faced the challenge of meeting commercial needs that often come with extremely fast timelines. Furthermore, Novellini needed to develop assembly instructions for the various product lines.

The Oil and Gas sector is a complex industry that requires intricate and efficient design processes. Traditional CAD design methods often result in heavy, costly, and time-consuming conceptual designs. The industry is constantly seeking ways to reduce material costs, save weight, and expedite the conceptual design process. Furthermore, there is a need to understand different manufacturing techniques better and gain a more comprehensive understanding of the part/assembly. The challenge lies in finding a solution that can address these issues while being easy to use and compatible with existing CAD systems.

Astec, Inc., a manufacturer of continuous and batch-process hot-mix asphalt plants, was faced with the challenge of developing a more energy-efficient drum dryer that could process a wide range of aggregate types at various tonnage rates. The drying process in asphalt production is energy-intensive, requiring hundreds of tons per hour of wet aggregate rock to be dried in a rotating drum dryer before being coated with liquid asphalt. This process ensures that the asphalt will bind to the rock. Inside the drum, the aggregate is kept in motion by shaped scoops called flights attached to the inner surface, which produce a 'veil' of falling material. Better veiling action improves heat transfer and speeds drying, reducing fuel consumption. However, direct observation of the drum in operation is very difficult, making it challenging to experiment with new flight designs.

Northrop Grumman Systems Corporation (NGSC), a global leader in aerospace and defense technology, was facing a significant challenge in their post-processing workflow. The process involved manually calculating combined stresses from NASTRAN results, which was particularly time-consuming due to the presence of hundreds of 1D beam elements with varying cross-sections in some system level models. Each type of 1D beam required its own set of calculations. The challenge was to automate this workflow to save time, minimize errors with simple user inputs, and scale the process to allow a variety of models, such as different cross-sections, to be post-processed.

Assystem UK Ltd, an international engineering and innovation consultancy group, was tasked with the design, simulation, prototyping, and verification testing of an encapsulation vessel for a customer in the nuclear industry. The challenge was to create an overpack, a protective barrier for product cans, that could withstand dynamic loading, such as being dropped during transit or falling to the ground in storage. The design had to endure drop heights of 3.5m (during transportation within the plant) and 1.5m (within the storage facility), with impact onto either a flat surface or an angled target. Additionally, due to the potential for internal pressurisation from gases inside the product can, the assembly had to be designed as a pressure vessel according to the rules of PD5500 and demonstrate a design life of 10 years.

Schiebel Group, a manufacturer of Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) based in Vienna, Austria, faced a significant challenge in optimizing the design of its CAMCOPTER® S-100. The S-100, an aerial system active throughout Europe, had to cover distances of up to 160 km, flying for more than 8 hours. This required a reliable, robust vehicle architecture and fuel supply. In addition to functionality requirements, Schiebel wanted the S-100 to be as light as possible to increase the vehicle’s reach. Furthermore, Schiebel had to ensure that its products were compliant with several national regulations, including the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA)’s light UAS operator certificate (LUC). The LUC includes guidelines on safe operation, control systems reliability, and a permit to fly. To meet these demanding development goals and allow Schiebel to take the S-100 of today into the future, the company needed a multidisciplinary design approach.

Automotive Components Floby AB (AC Floby), a Swedish company with over 60 years of experience in manufacturing products for the automotive industry, was facing a significant challenge. The company was losing critical production time while constructing brake components for cars. This inefficiency was affecting their overall productivity and profitability. The company was in search of a solution that could stabilize and optimize their production process. Initially, they hired NovaCast for simulations on a consulting basis. However, as the need for professional simulations increased, they realized the need for a more permanent and efficient solution.

A biofuels company based in Longmont, CO, aimed to be a leader in converting woody biomass into drop-in transportation fuels. However, they faced several challenges in the high-temperature bioreforming process. One of the key challenges was the small-scale gas-solid separator classifier, which was designed to separate particles from gases by size from a product stream for subsequent analysis. Another challenge was determining a material’s resistance to thermal stress. The company hypothesized that the rapid insertion of a cold lance into a hot chamber would create a stress spike sufficient to break the specimen. Furthermore, the biomass conversion rates depended on an evolving particle size distribution, particle shape, and porosity. The physical properties used in CFD depended on temperature, pressure, and composition.

Singapore’s National Supercomputing Centre (NSCC) is a critical part of the nation's research infrastructure, supporting innovation in various sectors such as healthcare, urban planning, and biodiversity. NSCC was in search of a long-term collaborator who could provide a comprehensive workload management solution for its ASPIRE 1 petascale supercomputer. The center required a robust, enterprise-grade solution to optimally schedule, monitor, and manage its supercomputers. Additionally, NSCC needed a centralized resource allocation and budgeting solution to manage stakeholder resource quotas. The center also sought a national license plan to offer the software to all nonprofit research organizations in Singapore. The challenge was to find a solution that could cater to these diverse needs while ensuring efficient and effective use of the supercomputers.

ArcelorMittal, the world’s leading steel and mining company, faced a challenge in optimizing a large-scale charging chute of a sinter cooler plant in Fos-Sur-Mer. The objective was to improve the reliability and efficiency of the device by identifying a better design that enhanced granular segregation, abrasion, and mechanical resistance. The process of charging hot material into the sinter cooler often led to particle segregation, causing severe problems such as fire issues on conveyor belts and sinter quality issues. The R&D team needed to investigate these segregation patterns, particularly the impact of particle sizes and the effect of the filling ratio on the segregation patterns in the trolleys of the sinter strand. However, simulating granular flows in a large system compared to the particle size was complex and time-consuming. The team needed a modelling strategy that balanced computational efficiency and physical realism.

Borçelik, a leading galvanized steel producer in Turkey, was faced with the challenge of reducing emissions and fuel consumption in the automotive industry. This required the development of advanced materials and production processes. Fuel efficiency in vehicles largely depends on the successful design of the vehicle body structure and the development of technologies that can reduce its weight. However, while reducing the weight of the vehicle structure, it was crucial to maintain passenger safety. The main focus of this study was to investigate the ductile fracture behavior of the high-strength galvanized flat steel that forms the vehicle body structure.

BOTTPOWER, a Spanish motorsport engineering company, was tasked with designing a lightweight stay bracket for their motorbike that could withstand main and aerodynamic loads. The goal was to find the optimal weight and stiffness ratio to reduce weight while ensuring safety measures. The challenge was to complete this task quickly in order to showcase the bike at Addit3D, Spain's most important 3D-print fair. Two engineers on the team had experience with Altair, so they chose Altair HyperWorks™ for finite-element analysis (FEA), Altair Virtual Wind Tunnel (VWT) for computational fluid dynamics (CFD), and Altair Inspire™ for topological optimization.

Johnson & Johnson, a global healthcare giant, required on-demand compute capacity at scale for its research, particularly for Janssen Pharmaceuticals, which was working on the COVID-19 vaccine. The company needed to easily scale down this capacity when not in use, a feat only achievable with cloud infrastructure. Janssen was operating over 10 production High-Performance Computing (HPC) clusters on Amazon Web Services (AWS), used by scientists and developers worldwide. However, they were seeking an off-the-shelf solution to replace the open-source Grid Engine and a cloud management tool that no longer supported their preferred vendor. The challenges included accommodating existing infrastructure and systems that had evolved over a decade, managing a complex networking setup, and integrating into configuration and change management systems. Furthermore, each cluster was configured differently, adding to the complexity.

Baker Hughes, a leading supplier of oilfield services, products, technology, and systems to the worldwide oil and natural gas industry, was facing several environmental and technological challenges. These included operating in offshore deep-water and Arctic environments, dealing with shale and hydraulic fracturing, and adhering to stricter environmental and safety regulations. Technological challenges included drilling deeper wells, dealing with extreme pressures and temperatures, and handling unconventional geological variations. The company was also tasked with the development of an Expandable Liner Hanger System, a mechanical system used to attach a liner string to the bottom of a previously run casing string during wellbore construction operations within the oil and gas industry. This system is used to hang heavier liner under extreme deep-water environment, subsalt plays, or deviated wells.

Serba Dinamik’s management was seeking to implement an advanced predictive maintenance system that would do more than simply limiting downtime. They needed to provide clients with on-demand visibility into the turbine performance and potential future variances from normal operation. The system needed to detect anomalies and outliers in sensor data that may indicate impending failure of a subcomponent, and provide clear guidance on optimal maintenance scheduling based on planned rig operations and equipment performance. The team set a goal of boosting output for their microturbine power generators by an average of 25%, reducing downtime by 70%, and cutting maintenance expenses by 25%.