Buy-in and technology adoption have been critical to success for design teams.
At premium kitchen appliance manufacturer Sub-Zero Group, mechanical and fluid simulation have long been part of the engineer’s toolkit. But until this year, these were relegated to a “just in case” area of their engineers’ toolbox.
Traditionally, a new project at Sub-Zero began with drawings, then a prototype, followed by testing and development as the project proceeded towards manufacture. In this traditional research and development process, simulation was integrated for late-stage verification. Today, the company has realized significant benefits by utilizing simulation technology much earlier in the process, reducing physical prototypes by up to 50 percent, and accelerating development by nearly 20 percent.
“10 or 12 years ago, we began our simulation journey with a couple of seats of Ansys, one Mechanical and one Fluid. It started off as late-stage problem solving and firefighting,” said Terry Hardesty, Corporate Manager, Advanced Development at Sub-Zero, Inc. “At the beginning, our simulation team was only called upon when things went sour, and it was pretty frustrating when you realize a lot of this stuff could have been resolved much earlier on.”
The design engineering team at Sub-Zero included a few engineers who had experience with the capabilities simulation had to offer. They led a shift in how simulation was used by their team, but the traditional methods were deeply entrenched in the organization. Historically, simulation was viewed in the design engineering team as “opt-in.” Projects typically wouldn’t use it, but it was available. Hardesty
and other simulation champions aimed to shift towards “opt-out,” where engineers would see the value of simulation and use it on every project where it added value.
This change at Sub-Zero mirrors the larger trend that Scott Hanson, customer program director at Ansys, is seeing in many of its customers. The company has focused on creating one holistic platform to solve many physical problems, through acquisitions and development.
“We’ve seen an emerging trend in the last four years into product development simulation assessments, and customers interested in how simulation could have an impact on product development,” said Hanson. Incorporating simulation has benefits in production, such as reducing cycle time, improving quality and reducing waste. In product design, simulation can help engineers iterate faster and more cost-effectively, delivering a more innovative, more efficient and safer product.
To begin this shift at Sub-Zero, the team pulled engineers onto a new project early. Before the project requirements were even fully solidified, these engineers used simulation to lay foundational work and create useful models they then tweaked when requirements were finalized. Already, the improvements were obvious. “When we compared this project historically, we were able to eliminate one complete design iteration, which includes design, build and test. That’s a significant time and dollar expenditure on our part, equating to months,” said Hardesty.
In addition to speeding design and eliminating unnecessary prototype costs, the simulation engineers were able to iterate virtually. “It gives the engineers a lot more freedom to explore. To build up a full functioning prototype costs $10,000. That cost is prohibitive when trying six variants of the same design,” explained Hardesty. When design ideas are that expensive, engineers are forced to play it safe. With virtual models and simulation, engineers can take bigger risks with design. Simulation gives them license to try more ideas. This is transformational for design, and with this value demonstrated, other design team members began to buy-in to the advantages of using simulation as an active part of early development.
“What ends up happening is that customers are actually going through more design iterations by factors of 10 to hundreds,” said Hanson. “Things that weren’t necessarily possible before, either because we weren’t doing the simulation or because we didn’t have the hardware capacity to go do that. But we’re seeing that simulation and iterating in more design directions absolutely does have an impact on the design process, including physical prototyping.”
Hardesty has seen the same thing play out at Sub-Zero.
“We’ve gone through a transformation where simulation was once opt-in, where you can choose to use the new tool, to now where it’s opt-out, where if you’re not using simulation on a project, you have to justify why not,” said Hardesty. “There are a lot of good reasons why you wouldn’t. If you’ve got a really good understanding of the physics and you’re making relatively minor design changes, it may not make sense to go through the full process and do a full simulation.”
Increasing Adoption of Simulation Across Departments
Sub-Zero’s plans for a simulation sea-change don’t stop there. To learn more, Sub-Zero created what they call a simulation engineering council, which is a group of simulation users within the organization. “They understand the business really well,” said Hardesty. “They’re technical leaders in our organization, and they’re helping to set the vision for 2030. That’s something we didn’t have before.”
At Ansys, the experts encourage this type of thinking. “We’ve got customers today who are coming to us not with a discrete problem, but more around the business initiatives. How do I scale? How can simulation have an impact on quality, or my warranty?” said Hanson. “And that’s where the customers trust our experience to say, ‘Here’s what we would recommend.’ We can identify quantifiable and actionable items from a 12 to 18-month perspective that they can take on themselves. They could hire us to help them out or they can use a local partner.”
The vision for simulation at Sub-Zero now includes manufacturing engineering, electronic controls engineering, reliability and several other functional groups that simulation can benefit outside the current users, which only includes the design engineering group.
“We do have one use case in manufacturing doing some forming simulation, but our plan is to keep expanding it in a very measured and well-thought-out way,” said Hardesty.
Infrastructure Changes to Support Simulation Technology
One important factor to note is that simulation is a resource-hungry tool for computer hardware. An organization can’t simply ask the IT department to push Ansys to engineers’ work laptops the way they would with Microsoft Excel. To implement more seats of Ansys, Sub-Zero had to make some infrastructure changes.
“We had an on-premise server cluster that was aging,” recalled Hardesty. “At one point, we thought we would try to go straight to the cloud, and we found some issues with that.”
Cloud computing is often lauded as the scalable solution for every manufacturer’s processing and data storage needs. In fact, Ansys has identified the trend of cloud solutions for simulation, and Hanson says the trend is mostly in the cloud.
“It reduces internal IT costs, which customers may not have expertise in, especially when it comes to simulation-specific software and all the integration points involved. Products are becoming more and more complex, and the simulations have become larger. That’s why we’re seeing customers moving in that direction,” Hanson said.
Sub-Zero found that a hybrid system worked best for their needs. It eliminated the complexity of spinning up virtual machines and allowed the IT department to procure the exact hardware—though it was costly—that was needed for the software requirements. “Right now, we’re built on a hybrid system, with an updated server cluster serving a lot of our users, and a few high-performance desktop machines for dedicated simulation,” said Hardesty. “These are really expensive computers,” he said. “I had a little sticker shock when I saw the graphics card costs. We even had a question if the decimal point was in the right place.”
But the capital expenditure worked out. Sub-Zero put the high-performance computers in dedicated offices, allowing engineers to work, train others and run complex simulations without distractions. This investment underlines the company’s renewed focus on simulation.
“These are dedicated rooms with nice big dual monitors and enough room for a mentor to be in there with a trainee as well. Likewise, if an engineer is doing a super intense simulation that they just need the additional focus, they can check out those rooms and only simulation users are even allowed to book those rooms. They got a nice room, and they’ve got a nice view, too. I’m kind of jealous,” said Hardesty.
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