Engineering.com’s simulation roundup of recent news.
Siemens’ Simcenter E-Machine Design = MAGNET + SPEED + Motorsolve
The 2312 release of Simcenter Mechanical simulation focuses on making workflows more collaborative between design, simulation and physical testing. As part of this release, Siemens Digital Industries Software announced Simcenter E-Machine Design software to help engineers design electric machines. The tool brings together the functionalities of Simcenter SPEED, Motorsolve and MAGNET, enabling engineers to replicate physical electric machine experiments within a digital space. Engineers will benefit from E-Machine Design’s template-based design workflow. This enables engineers to model numerous electric machines without being a finite element expert. The aim here is to reduce development time and reduce the barriers to using simulation tools. The tool also helps engineers reduce the operational temperatures of electric machines and simulate axial flux.
Ansys and DXOMARK partnership expands their optical simulation workflows
A new partnership between Ansys and DXOMARK offers engineers an end-to-end workflow for virtual camera systems by combining Ansys Lumerical, Ansys Zemax OpticStudio, Ansys Speos and DXOMARK Analyzer. This workflow will bridge the gap between physical measurements and simulation by using the image quality analysis capabilities of Analyzer and augmenting them with Ansys’ portfolio of optical simulation software. The idea is to first run simulations in Zemax OpticStudio to optimize lens designs, and then simulate complex micro-components in Lumerical. Results are then passed onto Speos to build a virtual model of the camera. Speos Sensor System Exporter is then used to pass results to Analyzer to assess image noise, flare, dynamic ranges and distortions. This workflow is targeting the autonomous vehicle and medical markets to help develop new optical products and systems.
Rescale adds quantum computing to its cloud-based HPC offerings
Rescale, a supplier of pay-as-you-go, cloud-based, on-demand HPC resources, has partnered with IonQ to give engineers access to quantum computing technology. Currently, the Rescale platform connects engineers to top-of-the-line HPC tools designed to compute simulations and AI problems. With this new partnership, quantum computers, such as the 29-qubit IonQ Forte, will be on the platform. This will help engineers solve some problems once thought incalculable or computationally expensive. Rescale and IonQ note the industries likely to benefit from this announcement include product development, healthcare, life sciences, materials research and more.
Siemens changes how to share circuit thermal models for 3D CFD analysis
Siemens has announced Boundary Condition Independent Reduce Order Models (BCI-ROM), a new feature in Simcenter Flotherm for electronics cooling simulation. The tool enables engineers to simplify and obfuscate their integrated circuit designs while maintaining the ability for others to run CFD simulations with the part. This will help protect intellectual properties, enhance supply chain collaboration and ensure the accuracy of electronic systems by enabling engineers throughout the part life cycle to use the model. For instance, a chip’s ROM can be sent to customers so they can assess the thermal performance of their designs without knowing the chip’s specifics. This will protect the chip manufacturer from IP theft.
Ansys and Humanetics to expand crash test dummy simulations
Ansys has agreed to buy a minority stake in Humanetics, which will improve collaboration between the two organizations. Humanetics provides engineers with physical and digital anthropomorphic test devices (ATD) — colloquially known as crash test dummies. Digital ATDs are often used in simulations to assure the safety and ergonomics of products. The partnership will aim to further these assessments via digital twin technology by linking physical and digital ATDs together. This will help engineers design products, improve testing and inform the decision-making process.
Autodesk releases Moldflow 2024
The 2024 release of Autodesk Moldflow includes improvements to Moldflow Adviser, Insight and Synergy. Changes in this update include an updated user interface for Study Duplication features, the decoupling of the material database installation from the release and improvements of the general solver in the areas of Dual Domain warpage, shrinkage, sink marks and thermal expansion predictions.
Markforged’s new tool blends simulation and AI to optimize print strength
Markforged has recently released Performance Advisor, a tool which automatically suggests optimal print settings to improve the strength of additive manufactured parts. The tool does this, without user-specified use cases, by assessing the geometry’s eigenmodes — or how the part naturally vibrates. Performance Advisor notes the regions of the part most susceptible to deformation and stress and then uses machine learning to suggest print settings to address these issues. This tool is not meant to replace simulation in cases where use cases are known and well understood. But when engineers are early in the development process, this tool can speed up the time to print a physical prototype.
