Automotive

The automotive industry is evolving at an unprecedented pace; a transformation driven by simulation. As a product development partner to the world’s largest OEMs and suppliers, we work to accelerate product development, enhance passenger safety and experience, all while optimizing vehicle fuel economy and durability. Our technologies are changing the way vehicles of all types are designed.

SAVE ENGINEERING TIME

NVH, Strength, and Fatigue

How can Altair OptiStruct analysis save engineering time, reduce modeling errors, enable process automation, decrease development costs, and allow you to explore more iterations faster?

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Bridge the gap between aerodynamics and the design studio, understand the performance of vehicle design ideas as early as the sketch pad with Altair Inspire Studio and Altair ultraFluidX

A Common Simulation Language

With overnight aerodynamic simulations, engineers can drive performance improvements without sacrificing design styling. By reviewing studio innovations daily, engineers can explain how a design shapes air flow and designers are able to resolve issues on time and with style.

Royal Enfield discuss the deployment of the Altair HyperWorks Unlimited Appliance. The appliance is available on-premises or cloud-based to accelerate vehicle development programs through elevated CAE throughput or tactical cloud bursting.

Cloud Bursting Boosts Vehicle Development Programs

On-demand, high-performance computing (HPC) presents the opportunity to securely scale simulation capabilities during peak demand, satisfying the need for detailed, multi-disciplinary optimization studies on multiple programs to reduce development costs and risk.

The future of product development is where data analytics, simulation, and high-performance computing converge.

Data Analytics Shapes Early Vehicle Design Decisions

Identify the most promising concepts and critical subsets of performance criteria earlier in design exploration and by applying statistical methods for dimensionality reduction on the huge number of design variables considered during a vehicle program.

Want to improve your vehicle performance?

Developing a new vehicle architecture for electric vehicles with the Altair C123 concept development process driven by optimization.

Accelerate Product Development

Create robust architectures during pre-program: The Altair Concept 1-2-3 (C123) design process enables designers to confidently create innovative, next-generation architectures by using simulation to inform vehicle architecture, manufacturing processes, material selection, and platform strategies.

Leverage high-performance computing: OEMs and suppliers rely on HPC for a faster time-to-market and superior product quality. Altair PBS Works™ is a comprehensive workload management suite for clusters, supercomputers, and the cloud. Altair Access™ lets you remotely visualize and interact with your data and applications, even across networks with challenging latencies.

Drive even more design with simulation: Altair’s next generation HyperWorks experience was created to enable your team to move from physics to physics, domain to domain, and even create reports without ever leaving the model. Every tool in the suite delivers a solution-specific workflow with a meticulously designed and discoverable user-interface.

Minimizing the interior noise (buzz, squeak, and rattle) in electric vehicles is even more important than in internal combustion vehicles. Altair Squeak and Rattle Director enables sources of BSR to be found and fixed earlier in the product development.

A Safer, More Comfortable Driving Experience

Increase passenger protection: In the age of autonomy and car sharing, new seating positions demand a fresh investigation of passenger safety using Altair Radioss™, an industry standard for automotive crash, impact, and airbag simulations. Altair MotionSolve™ helps chassis systems achieve vehicle dynamics targets and ensure safe maneuverability. With Altair Feko™, vehicle connectivity and electromagnetic compatibility (EMC), which are essential to today’s vehicles, can be verified.

Improve quality and design performance: Customers expect better vehicle performance, including minimizing noise, vibration and harshness (NVH), and the annoying squeak and rattle (S&R) phenomena. Altair NVH Director™ reduces the full-vehicle NVH simulation time, freeing CAE engineers to optimize product design and performance. Altair Squeak and Rattle Director™ identifies and analyzes design alternatives to eliminate S&R causes.

Create the optimal environment: In the past, engineers relied on wind tunnel tests during the design cycle to determine the effectiveness of heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems. Altair AcuSolve™ helps make more informed decisions earlier in the design cycle. Using transient computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation, it accurately models the air flow through the HVAC system, ensuring safer windshield defrosting capability, while optimizing the thermal management of electrical and mechatronic systems.

More Autonomous and ADAS

Altair products help automotive companies to improve fuel efficiency, achieve durability goals, and accelerate powertrain electrification.

Improved Fuel Efficiency and Durability

Better tools for fuel efficiency: Automakers need a multipronged approach to achieve fuel efficiency, lighter structures, and aerodynamics performance. Altair OptiStruct™ helps designers and engineers do just that, all while reducing costs and maintaining performance. Altair ultraFluidX™ improves external aerodynamic performance by applying GPU hardware to speed their decision making.

Durability for fleet or personal use: Future fleets of autonomous vehicles will cover more miles than personal cars for economic reasons: to cover the cost of expensive hardware and increase profitability by driving longer than a human would. Altair HyperLife™ provides a comprehensive toolset for durability analysis to enable the prediction of fatigue life under the repetitive loadings of a vehicle life. Vehicle durability loads can be extracted from MotionSolve®.

Accelerate powertrain electrification: The move towards hybrid and full-electric powertrain systems delivers both business challenges and opportunities. Bringing BEV development cycles into alignment with traditional timelines require changes to engineering team structures and toolsets. Powertrains must be highly efficient and lightweight while meeting new regulations and growing customer expectations.

More EVs and Hybrids

Automotive’s Only Award Dedicated to Vehicle Lightweighting

We have a deep commitment to vehicle efficiency, so much so that we have established the automotive industry’s only award dedicated to vehicle lightweighting. The Altair Enlighten Award honors the greatest achievements in vehicle weight savings each year. It inspires interest from business leaders, engineers, policymakers, educators, students and the public, stirring competition for new ideas and providing an incentive to share advances.

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Featured Resources

Enabling EV Excellence – Simulation Helps Rimac Improve Structural Design of Innovative Hypercar

Rimac Automobili’s main challenge has been to design a monocoque as a single carbon fiber part with an unprecedented size. Hence, in the development of the monocoque, the main topic to manage was the material, a lightweight, carbon fiber reinforced with epoxy resin. As this carbon fiber is an orthotropic and brittle material, its representation in a finite element (FE) material card is very difficult. To meet this challenge the company introduced Altair HyperWorks™ into their development process.

Customer Stories

Renault Nissan Mitsubishi Alliance Uses Altair SimSolid to Bring Vehicles Chassis Faster onto the Road

Renault Nissan Mitsubishi Alliance is a French-Japanese strategic partnership between the automobile manufacturers Renault (based in France), Nissan (based in Japan) and Mitsubishi Motors (based in Japan). Today, the automotive group has 122 manufacturing plants worldwide with nearly 450,000 employees controlling ten major brands: Renault, Nissan, Mitsubishi, Infiniti, Renault Samsung, Dacia, Alpine, Datsun, Venucia, and Lada. The ambition of the alliance is to offer autonomous drive, connectivity features, and services on a wide range of affordable vehicles. As part of the Renault Chassis Le Mans plant, which is building car-to-ground connecting components for the Renault Group and for the Alliance, the CTC Chassis Technical Center is a CAD engineering center where 350 engineers and technicians are working with a focus on testing and validation. Renault has been using SimSolid to perform simulations to develop lighter chassis faster.

Customer Stories

Designing Optimized Aluminum Castings with Fatigue Life Considerations

Andras Tanos, R&D Engineer at FemAlk ZRT, talks about how they have used Altair solutions for topology optimization of an engine part.

Video Testimonials, Videos

Multidisciplinary Workflow to Assess Modal Fatigue Results of a 4-Cylinder Crankshaft Using AVL EXCITE, OptiStruct and FEMFAT

The crankshaft of an engine is a highly dynamically loaded component that is continuously optimized and optimized in terms of design and production technology. In order to be able to reproduce this in the simulation, the essential influences must be considered. This includes the dynamically behaviour in combination with the engine, the material properties and the application of the loads and their transfer to other parts (bearings). The modal approach has established itself as a proven method here, whereby a modal basis is determined in the FEM so that the crankshaft is integrated as a flexible body in the MKS model of the engine, and so that an entire engine run-up can be simulated. The modal participation factors are obtained from the MBS simulation, which are used together with the modal stresses for the safety factor calculation. This workflow requires the combination of different simulation tools. The challenge is to organize the data transfer between the tools efficient and correct. In this example, the workflow is realized using OptiStruct from Altair for FEM calculation, EXCITE from AVL as MKS tool and FEMFAT from Magna Powertrain ECS as Fatigue solver. This makes it possible to simulate a complex engine run-up with consideration of the ignition bearing forces and to calculate the fatigue life of the crankshaft in FEMFAT. This webinar, details of the simulation workflow of the 4-cylinder crankshaft will be presented and the effects of several influencing variables on the fatigue life will be studied.

Webinars

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