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Atelier Normand, a French SME, manufactures complex wooden structures including advanced platforms. The company is faced with the challenge of quickly designing and manufacturing structures with more functionalities such as storage, evacuation routes, phone booths, etc., while still adhering to safety regulations such as Eurocode 0, 1, and 5. The company needed to identify potential weaknesses in their designs, validate their compliance with safety codes, and address safety questions related to the addition of components like guardrails. The challenge was to do all this quickly and efficiently, which was difficult with traditional methods.

A steel storage building located on a canal between downtown New Orleans and Lake Pontchartrain was damaged during Hurricane Katrina. The insurance company claimed that the damage, where the walls were pushed outward in two areas, was water-related. As the insurance only covered wind damage, the claim was denied. TRC Companies, Inc., representing the owners of the storage building, faced the challenge of proving that the damage was caused by wind, not water. The traditional approach of applying equations relating force and wind speed would not have included information about the building shape or accounted for the air flowing through open doors inside the building. TRC determined that a more accurate simulation of the pressure forces on the building would provide more persuasive evidence that the damage was wind-related.

HyPerComp Inc., a leading software company in the aerospace industry, specializes in the development and dissemination of high-performance computational technologies. These technologies employ parallel computing code/hardware architectures and physics-based mathematical models to solve a wide range of problems in both defense and commercial applications. The company's technology strengths include general geometry CAD modeling and repair, unstructured hybrid gridding, user-friendly GUI-based preprocessing, domain decomposition tools for fine-grain parallel architectures, higher order accurate space and time discretization for solving linear/nonlinear partial differential equations, solution acceleration techniques, and knowledge-based expert system shells. However, the company faced challenges in converting customer-provided geometries from IGES format into internal ICEM CFD formats for subsequent processing. The need for a solution that could generate high-quality grids with minimum pre-processing and setup requirements was evident.

HyPerComp Inc., a company that develops high-performance computing technologies for defense, energy, and commercial product design, faced a significant challenge in accurately simulating the various linear and nonlinear processes that govern a physical phenomenon. The company's work involves complex, multidisciplinary physical processes, and a high-quality mesh is a critical necessity for these simulations. The company usually receives geometries in IGES format, which are then imported into their system. However, the existing process was not efficient enough, and the company needed a solution that could provide high-quality meshes suitable for the most demanding higher order solvers.

The pharmaceutical industry is fraught with numerous challenges, from drug delivery to equipment design optimization and scale-up problems. Increasing raw material costs and the unavailability of the right raw materials at the right time pose significant issues in meeting stringent product delivery deadlines. Dr. Reddy’s, a global pharmaceutical company, faced these challenges and sought to explore engineering simulations to address them effectively. The company engaged with ANSYS to leverage their expertise in this field, aiming to develop accurate scale-up conditions by performing steady-state and transient simulations at each scale. They sought to study parameters like velocity distributions, mixing times, and species concentrations from one scale to the other.

The Biomedical Engineering Center of Wayne State University has been conducting research in impact biomechanics and automotive safety for over six decades. They are a leading institution in the development of finite element models of the human body. These models are used to understand injury mechanisms during automotive impacts and help design countermeasures. They are also useful in orthopaedics biomechanics to understand in-vivo loading. However, due to the use of explicit finite element codes, the typical meshing objective is a high-quality fully hexahedral mesh that respects minimum element size criteria. The anatomical complexity and irregularity of shapes make meshing a critical task in the development of these models. The team typically meshes bones and organs, with geometrical data reconstructed based on medical imaging (MRI or CT scans).

GEA Ecoflex India Pvt. Ltd., a part of the Global Engineering Alliance Group, operates in the competitive heat exchanger sector. The company's primary challenge was to expedite the product development process while ensuring the heat exchangers met client technical specifications for safety, space, environmental concerns, structural integrity, and international standards. The company needed to reduce prototyping time to deliver innovative products to the market first and grow its business. The heat exchangers, being a vital element in a wide range of industries, had to deliver excellent return on investment, reliable operation, and reduced maintenance costs for the companies using them.

FEDCO, a leading designer and manufacturer of advanced high-speed liquid-driven turbochargers and centrifugal pumps for reverse osmosis desalination services, was facing a significant challenge. The company's main market is the supply of high-pressure pump and energy recovery equipment for seawater desalination. With water shortages and growing energy costs, the market was growing rapidly, attracting major international competitors. To sustain its growing market share, FEDCO needed to develop larger and more efficient models of its established hydraulic energy recovery units. However, the expense and time involved in building and testing large prototypes were not acceptable. The company had less than four weeks to develop a highly optimized fluid design before committing to final pattern and casting designs. The main challenge was that FEDCO had just one chance to get the hydraulic and casting design right, so every resource was devoted to that objective.

The Central Artery/Tunnel Project, also known as 'The Big Dig', was a massive undertaking in Boston, Massachusetts, aimed at replacing the Interstate 90 roadway. The project involved constructing a new seven-mile, 8-10 lane roadway and various interchanges, most of which were to be built 70 feet beneath the city. However, the project posed significant challenges due to its proximity to some of the largest and oldest buildings in downtown Boston. One such building was the One Financial Center, a 46-story office building located just 25 feet away from a 100-feet deep excavation for the tunnel. The building's owners were concerned about the potential effects of the excavation on the building's stability. The excavation process involved a 'de-watering' step, where water was removed from the dig site and surrounding soil. This could cause the ground to compress, potentially leading to building settlement, structural stress, and damage.

Aditya Birla Science and Technology Company was facing a significant challenge in their Stable Bleaching Powder (SBP) manufacturing process. The process involved the chlorination of hydrated lime by aerating an SBP solids bed with chlorine gas. However, the company was losing approximately 60 kg/batch of solids, which comprised of products, reactants, and intermediate compounds. These losses were resulting in significant time and cost inefficiencies. The goal was to minimize these losses without making major modifications to the SBP plant. The challenge was to identify process parameters that could be altered to improve the efficiency of the process. However, being a closed-loop system, onsite physical measurements were difficult to carry out.

Life Fitness, a global leader in fitness equipment manufacturing, faced a significant challenge in ensuring the reliability and safety of their cardiovascular and strength equipment. The equipment extensively uses cylindrical bushings and plain bearings to transmit high radial loads from a rotating shaft to a support structure. To meet reliability goals, it was crucial to accurately determine the contact pressures between the bushing and shaft to ensure that bushing wear rates were within acceptable limits. Traditional methods, such as bushing catalogs and Hertzian formulas, were used to predict these pressures. However, these methods failed to account for axial misalignment between the shaft and bushing, which could lead to extremely high nonuniform pressure distributions, making it difficult to ensure the longevity and safety of the equipment.

KeelWit Technology, a Spanish engineering company, was tasked with creating a vertical wind tunnel with the tallest wind chamber in Europe. The challenge was to analyze a complex aerodynamic environment and design an energy-efficient tunnel that delivered the best experience for their customers. Vertical wind tunnels are large and complex, making the creation of physical prototypes for each design change prohibitively expensive and time-consuming. The simulation of variables such as air pressure, heat loss, and wind velocity required large meshes and intensive computer calculations. KeelWit sought to scale out from their on-premises workstations to high-performance computing (HPC) resources in the cloud.

Engrana, a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and thermal analysis consulting firm, faced a significant challenge in preparing customer-supplied geometries for analysis. Clients would typically provide CAD files of solid geometry, which often contained many details that were not relevant to the flow analysis. The process of de-featuring and simplifying the solid geometry, as well as decomposing the geometry to produce high-quality hex-dominant meshes, was a complex and time-consuming task. Before the introduction of SpaceClaim, the responsibility of geometry de-featuring was primarily left to the clients, making the cleanup process a difficult and iterative task. Furthermore, clients often wanted to explore the sensitivity of the CFD solution to geometrical changes, which required a tool that could easily incorporate these changes with minimal effort.

ABB Switzerland Ltd., a global leader in power and automation technology, faced a significant challenge with their HiPak modules. These modules, used in a variety of applications from traction converters to motor drives, required different cooling systems to remove the heat dissipated by the insulated gate bipolar transistors (IGBT) and diodes. The cooling systems varied substantially, making it crucial for ABB to predict the maximum package temperature to ensure reliability and proper functionality. The challenge was to find a solution that could accurately predict the temperature field of the coupled HiPak module–heat exchanger system and provide a reliable means to find the optimal heat exchanger configuration.

Trenitalia, the Italian railway operator, was facing challenges in managing the development, construction, and maintenance of the rail transportation system in the country. The Technical and Research Department of Trenitalia was using ANSYS Mechanical for design optimization, stress strength structural checks, and maintenance engineering planning. However, the need for larger analysis models and shorter computer response times led Trenitalia to evaluate new calculation solutions. The primary issues they had to overcome included limitations in model size due to the amount of real memory used by 32-bit finite-element programs, long solution times resulting from using a single-processor platform, and hardware architecture bottlenecks in memory and storage sub-systems that increased elapsed solution times. To address these issues, Trenitalia began investigating 64-bit technology, with efficiency requirements suggesting a scalable SMP architecture.

PIAGGIO, a leading manufacturer of motorized two-wheeled vehicles, was facing a significant challenge in analyzing complex geometry under test conditions. The company lacked information about the critical areas, which made the model require a high level of detail everywhere. The detailed features, such as rounds, could not be neglected. This situation posed a significant challenge as it required a meticulous and time-consuming process to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the test results.

Samsung Electronics Inc.’s IPT group specializes in the thermal design and analysis of semiconductor packages. Their main product group includes microprocessors for mobile products, display drive ICs, smart cards, and display panel processors. The IPT group is responsible for the analysis of leadframe, ball grid array (BGA), and tape automated bonding (TAB) packages, as well as the development of new package designs. However, as the demand for more complex modules of system-in-package (SIP) and package-on-package (POP) design increases, the need for more accurate and easier-to-use simulation solutions becomes apparent. The challenges faced by the IPT group include detailed modeling, type diversity, maintaining device integrity and its electrical performance, and making thermal software accessible to non-thermal engineers.

TRW Automotive, one of the world's largest automotive suppliers, faced a significant challenge in the design and validation process of brake rotors. Vehicle manufacturers require both virtual and empirical validation for design proposals, and the maturity of these proposals often determines the awarding of new business contracts. To remain competitive, suppliers like TRW Automotive must become more efficient in their design and validation processes. This need for efficiency has driven the automotive supplier base to further leverage and expedite upfront Computer-Aided Engineering (CAE). However, the traditional CAE process, which involves a sequential approach to pre-processing, solving, and post-processing, was proving to be too long and inefficient. This process had to be repeated for each design concept and across various analysis types. If the final analysis did not meet performance targets, the process had to be started over, wasting valuable time.

Jet Towers, a small startup company in Brazil, faced a significant challenge in providing internet service in rural areas of the country where optical fiber was not economical due to low population density. The company aimed to address this market with tower-mounted Wi-Fi, which required a lower initial investment. However, the company needed to quickly build a large number of towers to start earning a return on their investment. The management had the idea of a modular line of towers based on components that were designed and built in advance. These components could then be assembled and installed in a fraction of the time required to design and build each tower from scratch. The modules needed to be optimized from both a fluid flow and structural perspective so they could be used to construct antennas with a wide range of heights and load-supporting capabilities while keeping total installation costs to a minimum. This represented a potentially overwhelming task for a company with only one design engineer and no analysts.

Connecticut Reserve Technologies (CRT) faced a significant challenge in the development of microturbines for compact cogeneration units. These units, designed to provide economical and reliable power for manufacturing plants and other facilities, relied on advanced structural ceramics like silicon nitride. While these ceramics allowed the microturbines to operate at higher temperatures than conventional metal alloys, leading to significant fuel savings and emissions reductions, they also exhibited large variations in fracture strength. This was particularly true when considering the inherent flaws resulting from various surface treatments. The challenge was to account for these complex statistical strength distributions to make more accurate predictions of expected component life. Another challenge was defining and implementing a method that establishes Weibull distribution metrics for silicon nitride suppliers based on the particular component. This required combining service stress states from the various treated surfaces of a rotor blade with a stipulated component reliability to develop material performance curves.

The design of an aircraft engine combustor is a complex, multidisciplinary process that involves aero CFD, combustion, heat transfer CFD, dynamics, thermal, mechanical, and life prediction. GE Global Research Center, in collaboration with GE Aircraft Engines, was tasked with developing advanced combustor design technologies to meet aggressive new product introduction (NPI) analysis requirements. A significant challenge in this process was the generation of high-quality meshes in an automatic fashion. The mesh quality plays a critical role in the automated design process, affecting the analysis accuracy. Moreover, the meshing procedures needed to be scriptable, without human intervention. An all-hex mesh was required for the full combustor sector model to ensure analysis accuracy.

Air Science & Engineering was approached by a client in the metalworking industry who was grappling with the issue of metal fumes from a large torch cutting operation. These fumes were escaping into adjacent work areas, bypassing an existing ineffective side-draft hood, and contaminating the work environment. The challenge was to develop a hood design that would effectively capture and contain the process fumes while minimizing the required exhaust flow rate. The new hood also needed to be designed in a way that it would allow parts to be loaded by an overhead crane and accommodate the existing high-velocity push jet necessary to prevent the buildup of flammable gases under the workpiece.