A survey of more than 500 companies in a variety of industries inquired about the actions engineers could take to improve product development. The results of that survey showed that the top action (75%) was to use simulation earlier in product development to improve the design process.
About 53% of the respondents said that they wanted to promote collaboration between simulation analysts and designers. Managements are looking to enable a closer collaboration between the designers who perform the product designs and the simulation analysts who use simulation to help guide design decisions.
49% of the respondents want to combine more physics to increase the realism of their simulations.
A poll from a recent webinar hosted by Design World with ANSYS, and presented by Steve Scampoli, lead project manager for the design business, and Tejas Rao, lead engineer at ANSYS, asked the webinar attendees how many use simulation as part of the product development process. 80% responded positively.
The opportunity to reduce cost within the product development process is early in the concept and the design phase. Changes made later in the design process tend to increase costs, sometimes dramatically.
As you move into the prototype, then into production, and finally into service, the cost of making design changes can often significantly increase. Simulation has the greatest impact on design when it’s deployed early in the product development process.
Up front simulation also provides design guidance. It helps guide design decisions. Simulation answers questions like, is my design over stressed? How much deformation are these parts experiencing under load?
If you have a component mounted onto an engine, you might be interested in finding out the effects of vibration. What is the resonance frequency? If you have some type of service load for the parts or assemblies, what’s the fatigue life? When is the part going to fail? How many cycles can it withstand?
There is a lot of variation in how people handle product development:
–About 25% use industry or association standards
–About 23% use experience.
–About 31% use physical prototypes.
–About 18% use simulation
–About 2.5% use hand calculations.
Simulation is not the only tool used to validate design decisions.
ANSYS AIM offers a guided workflow through a simulation template that automates the setup and provides guidance through the process.
AIM leverages ANSYS solver technology “under the hood.” Whether it’s structural mechanics, electromagnetics, fluid physics, or heat transfer, AIM leverages ANSYS solver technology to make sure you’re getting the correct solution.
AIM allows collaboration between designers and simulation analysts, allowing for a seamless data transfer from AIM to either ANSYS Mechanical, or ANSYS Fluent.
ANSYS AIM also enables the use of multiphysics simulation.
A second poll question given to webinar attendees asked about design criteria. 67% responded that the accuracy of the analysis results is the most important criteria.
Ease of use was the second most mentioned criteria. If you are implementing simulation, you want that software to be easy to use and able to get from start to finish quickly.
The last desired criteria was: how fast can you get the solution from the program.
With AIM, you can start from virtually any CAD geometry, bring it into AIM, and quickly generate a mesh. This capability is due to ANSYS Solver Technology under the hood.
AIM offers several physics capabilities. With structural physics, for example, you can examine contact stresses between gear teeth. In a transmission assembly, you can look at the equivalent stresses in the gears, including frictional contact between the gear teeth. There might be a situation where you need to perform a simulation up front.
If you have assemblies, for example, would they have bolted connections? You might be interested in looking at the stresses as you’re tightening the individual bolts and looking at a bolt tightening sequence. You might also be interested in non-linear materials.
Maybe you’re doing a code evaluation, where you have to look at elastic- plastic analysis. Maybe you have a component that is overloaded, like a battery contact. Or you are interested in simulating the material beyond the yolk point. AIM allows you to solve a variety of structural applications through up front simulation.
AIM also can solve a variety of CFD applications, or fluid full applications. You might be interested in looking at the cooling of a device.
With components such as piping assemblies and valves, fluid flow or pressure drop may be of interest. Other examples include examining how a valve deforms based on the fluid pressures and temperatures. Another example is one-way fluid structure interaction simulation.
The next poll question focused on: what is the most common type of physics attendees need to simulate. Is it structural analysis? Stress and vibration? Fluid flow? It is drag, pressure drop, or velocity? Or thermal effects? Temperature or the heat flux in a device? Is it electromagnetics? The magnetic field? The magnetic force and torque? The current density?
The results of this survey showed that about 63% of webinar attendees are interested in structural analysis. About 23% are interested in fluid simulation, so looking at drag, pressure drop and velocity. A smaller percentage, about 10% are interested in thermal simulation. Finally about 4% are interested in electromagnetics, so looking at the magnetic fields, magnetic force and torque and current.
Some of the other capabilities of AIM allow users to rapidly evaluate design performance. You can leverage your parametric CAD data for parametric studies, or a design point study, evaluating virtually any input parameter to examine how it effects key outputs.
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