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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%.

The Wellcome Sanger Institute, a leading center for genomic discovery, was facing a significant challenge in managing the immense amount of data generated by their cancer genome projects. Each cancer sample produced approximately 250GB of data after initial processing, necessitating efficient data storage solutions. The team needed to make one of their cancer pipelines portable and optimize it for cloud deployment. Most pipelines were written and tested on local machines and then run in parallel on compute clusters with shared storage. However, the I/O behavior on clusters was very different, and without comprehensive I/O profiling tools, inefficient I/O patterns could negatively impact storage performance and hinder other work processes.

The client, a global bank with operations in over 60 countries, was facing challenges with its order management system (OMS) used for managing trade execution. The OMS provided some visibility into the trading workflow, but it lacked the ability to display aggregated information or make real-time comparisons between current activity and historical trading data. It also did not support filtering, which was crucial for traders to answer questions like the impact of new product offerings on business in specific markets. The OMS maintained multi-day open orders and data completed orders for a few weeks to allow rebooking, but it did not store and display large amounts of historical data that would enable traders to analyze trends and spot patterns in trading activity.

Hatch Ltd., a global supplier of engineering, project, and construction management services to the mining, metallurgical, energy, and infrastructure sectors, was contracted to upgrade the conveyor transfer point at an existing coal preparation plant. The client required upgrades to accommodate a scheduled increase in production. The conveyor carried coarse product coal, topped by a layer of filter cake with a high moisture content. The existing chute was prone to material build-up of this “sticky” filter cake, often plugging during surges in flow rate and causing costly downtime. Despite being a relatively small conveyor, at 1,200 t/h, it was critical to ensuring constant product throughput to truck-loading bins.

The increasing trend in wind power technology is to enhance power output through an increase in rotor diameter. However, as the rotor diameter increases, aeroelastic effects become increasingly important in the design of an efficient blade. A detailed understanding of the fluid elastic coupling can lead to improved designs, yielding more power, reduced maintenance, and ultimately leading to an overall reduction in the cost of electricity. Current wind turbine design practices use desktop engineering tools such as FAST and ADAMS to provide information about the aero-elastic behavior of the turbines. However, each of these techniques has its own advantages and disadvantages. An evolving approach for generating performance data on wind turbine rotors is through the use of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD).

In the competitive world of bicycle racing, the design and aerodynamics of the bike play a crucial role in a cyclist's performance. Manufacturers constantly strive to reduce the weight and aerodynamic drag of bikes by experimenting with different materials and shapes for the frames, wheels, and tires. However, evaluating the drag force at the system level and isolating the impact of hundreds of design variables at the component level has been a challenge. Traditional methods like wind tunnel testing are expensive, and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis workflows have been too lengthy to be practical. The challenge was to develop a highly automated, repeatable workflow methodology to accelerate the entire CFD process and provide new insights into the role various components play in bike performance.

INESPASA, a Spanish engineering company specializing in the aerospace and automotive sectors, faced a significant challenge in maintaining competitiveness in a demanding market. The company needed to deliver high-quality, complex products and components that complied with stringent standards and regulations, all while adhering to tight deadlines and limited budgets. A major challenge was the vertical integration of aerostructures, where adjustments were often required during the production of the first units, despite careful development. The time-consuming and expensive process of developing and testing aircraft component prototypes posed a significant hurdle. INESPASA needed to find faster, more efficient methods, such as multiphysics simulation, to evaluate its aero-structure designs, identify potential issues before they occurred, and ensure the viability of the implemented solutions.

RF2B was tasked with developing a phased array antenna proof of concept design for small cell Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) base stations at 3.5GHz for its customer Menlo Micro, a developer of high-performance RF MEMS switch integrated circuits. The challenge was to achieve enough azimuth and elevation beam steering range with enough grating lobe suppression and higher efficiency. This required high-level design analysis to decide the number of columns and rows, element type, element spacing, angular step size, and amplitude tapering for the antenna array. Another challenge was the overall complexity of the design, requiring a time-efficient antenna array simulation and design methodology that included the feed network. The antenna array also needed to be optimized in its mechanical environment, including the enclosure and radome.

The École de Technologie Supérieure (ÉTS) Team Rafale faced the challenge of building a high-speed, lightweight catamaran for the 'Little America’s Cup'. The class rules stipulated that the catamaran should be less than 25ft long with a maximum width of 14ft and less than 300sq ft. sail area. This presented a challenging opportunity to drive innovation and use the best materials possible. The catamaran needed to be built in less than 18 months. The hydrofoils, despite being less than two square feet in surface area, needed to be able to lift the entire boat and its two-man crew out of the water. The 30ft mast at the heart of the rigid wingsail carries almost 4000 lb. of compression while weighing less than 30lbs.

Inphi Corporation, a leader in high-speed data movement interconnects, was facing a challenge in the competitive semiconductor design and electronic design automation (EDA) industry. The company needed to leverage high-performance computing (HPC) and high-end design software to stay ahead of the competition. However, these tools are often expensive, and maximizing their utilization to ensure the design and development process runs quickly and efficiently was crucial. The company needed to deliver innovative technologies to market faster than competitors without increasing team size. Inphi, being the first-to-market with a 64Gbaud dual-channel linear TIA amplifier, a silicon photonics 100G DWDM platform in a QSFP28 form factor, and a 400G (4x100G PAM) Porrima™ Optics DSP platform, understood the importance of HPC and EDA software performance optimization.

Whirlpool, a renowned home appliance manufacturer, was facing a significant challenge in scaling up the capacity of its Indian design center. The company wanted to commit more to virtual design, testing, and evaluation, but the high licensing costs of technical solutions were a major deterrent. The challenge was to find a cost-effective solution that would allow them to increase their virtual design capacity without incurring prohibitive costs. This was crucial for Whirlpool to maintain its competitive edge in the market and continue delivering high-quality appliances to its customers.

In the space industry, the design, building, and testing of rover prototypes is a costly and time-consuming process. System testing typically does not occur until late in the design/testing process, leading to a long development time. The challenge was to find a way to test components within a simulation loop before a full rover prototype is available. This would create a virtual testing environment for the component under test, tricking it into thinking it is operating within a full prototype. The goal was to progressively add hardware components to the simulation loop as they become available, allowing system testing to take place even without all the hardware components, thereby bridging the gap between the design and testing phases.

The Ford Focus STREET collaborative team faced a significant challenge: they had only six weeks to complete a design for a specialty vehicle based on the Ford Focus platform. The project was a collaboration between Ford Racing, Altair Engineering, Bayer MaterialScience LLC, and PPG Industries. The design had to be unique and stylish, particularly above the belt line of the vehicle, which was critical for the Specialty Equipment Market Association (SEMA) show. The team also had to overcome logistical challenges such as sourcing the right materials in the appropriate color and developing inexpensive tooling for the molding of the parts. PPG had to check its inventory for the raw stock of Solextra, a blue glass that imparts a distinctive look, and adjust its manufacturing processes to fabricate the specialty glass. They also had to formulate and deliver a complementary color for the vehicle’s exterior finish within the tight timeframe.

HBPO GmbH, a joint venture of global leaders in automotive components, specializes in the development, assembly, and logistics of complete front-end modules for vehicle manufacturers. The challenge lies in the complexity of these modules, which require numerous components like headlights, radiator grille, bumper, front-end carrier, and components of the vehicle’s air conditioning, engine cooling, and crash management system. Depending on customer requests and preset specifications, HBPO covers assembly, development, and systems integration projects. The development and assembly of a front-end module require a wide variety of simulation applications, such as structural analysis, molding simulation, virtual crash tests, material data management, and more. Numerous varying software tools are required, some of which are only rarely used. To cover all these disciplines, it is crucial for HBPO to keep the development costs as low as possible and to have access to the required tools whenever they are needed.

RUAG Space, a leading provider of products for the space industry, was faced with the challenge of combining the powerful meshing and post-processing capabilities of Altair HyperWorks with the advanced composite failure analysis methods provided by ESAComp software from Altair. The company needed to streamline and accelerate the analysis of composite structures by significantly reducing unnecessary breaks in the data flow. The challenge was to create a seamless integration between the two software tools to provide a unified work environment for producing results needed in the design verification of satellite structures.

BMW, a leading manufacturer of premium automobiles and motorcycles, faced a significant challenge in ensuring passenger safety during crash events. The complexity of orchestrating the chain of events during a crash, including the timing of discrete events such as bolts breaking or parts coming into contact, was a daunting task. The key performance indicators, including energy absorption, peak force level before failure, local displacements, and weight, were either too complex or resulted in over-constrained optimization problems. This made it difficult to confidently validate crashworthiness within the fast-paced product development process. The challenge was to find a solution that could simplify this process, reduce the number of design iterations required, and ensure the highest level of safety for passengers.

The challenge lies in the efficient and accurate simulation of smart materials, specifically initially curved and twisted anisotropic beams such as those found on wind turbines and helicopters. These materials are complex due to their arbitrary sectional topology and the coupling effects between multiple physical domains. Direct analysis of these composite beam structures is computationally expensive, even with advanced supercomputers. The use of beam theory reduces computational cost significantly, but the lack of reliable mathematical modeling and analysis for smart systems presents a major barrier. This is due to the difficulty in modeling coupling effects and the anisotropic and heterogeneous nature of composite materials.

Skaigh Engineering, a UK-based company specializing in high-quality aluminum gravity die castings, faced several challenges in its manufacturing process. The casting industry is undergoing significant transformations due to increased customer demands and the growing complexity of parts. To stay competitive and grow in the global market, casting manufacturers like Skaigh needed to address issues such as reducing development and manufacturing costs. The company was dealing with wasted time spent on improving customers’ poor manufacturing techniques and long lead times due to trial-and-error development methods involving inherited dies. To improve the development process and address these challenges, Skaigh began exploring the use of simulation.