Altair Gets Ready to Roll Out HyperWorks 13.0

Altair rolls out HyperWorks 13.0 this week.

Some software businesses might treat release 13 with a sense of anxiety; others might sidestep it altogether by calling it something else other than release 13. But not Altair. When it's time to roll out HyperWorks 13.0, Simone Bonino, Altair's marketing director, sees no reason to flinch. He points out, "As engineers, we appreciate the fact that 13 is a Wilson prime number, a Fibonacci number and the smallest emirp ["prime" spelled backward]."

In the weeks leading up to the roll out of HyperWorks 13.0, the company began sharing sneak peeks of the product in a webinar and dedicated web site. Today, at the company's headquarter in Troy, Michigan,  the launch will be marked by a full-day event, beginning with breakfast at 8 AM, rounding out with cocktail at 4:30 PM.

The HyperWorks suite's emphasis is optimization, the company's core competency. Bonino says, "We currently have around 15 Optimization Centers all over the world, primarily in automotive and aerospace. Since they operate as a vehicle to transfer optimization and lightweight design knowledge from us to our customers, they have a relatively short life span, usually no more than 3-4 years."

Updates to OptiStruct and HyperStudy

In Altair's approach to optimization, the company's OptiStruct and HyperStudy software are the centerpieces. Jeff Brennan, chief marketing officer of Altair, explains in the media-preview webinar on Sep 16 that "There's significant advancements in our ongoing efforts to expand our linear analysis solutions into nonlinear analysis. In this release, the big highlight is the ability to do large displacement analysis in nonlinear analysis with hyper-elastic materials." Other new OptiStruct functions in this release are rotor dynamics and nonlinear heat transfer.

As a recognition of the growing need to combine solvers for multiphysics problems, HyperWorks 13.0 accommodates coupling of MotionSolve, Altair's multibody mechanical solver, and AcuSolve, Altair's general-purpose fluid flow solver. The company has also added some more physics in its structural analysis engine RADIOSS to simulate crack propagation and airbag deployment, two phenomenons commonly studied by automotive manufacturers.

Multithreading

"The real benefits of simulation comes from running multiple simulations, potentially hundreds of thousands of them. That requires robust compute power," says Brennan. By refining its multi-threading code, the company says it manages to make many of its solvers ran faster. RADIOSS, for instance, is "1.43 x faster than [HyperWorks] 12.0 on Intel Haswell processors."

Uwe Schramm, Altair's CTO for solver technologies, says, "If you have multicore computers with multicore technology, you want to be able to use every processor in your computer to solve your problem. Now, we're looking at a technology where we can have crash models with 15 million elements, and we're paralleling up to 3,000 processors."

Multi-threaded performance is critical to Altair's vision with HyperWorks Unlimited, a specialized appliance that could function as private cloud or onsite HPC system. By leasing the hardware, users get unlimited access to bundled Altair software (hence, the name HyperWorks Unlimited). The appliance is aimed at those who want to pursue optimization studies involving hundreds or thousands of design iterations.

The Excel Handshake

Underneath software interfaces, optimization is driven by numerical calculations to understand the design parameter changes and their associated impacts. In HyperWorks 13.0, the company plans to embrace Excel -- the standard spreadsheet software -- as an input device by allowing the use of Excel spreadsheets as entries for both OptiStruct and HyperStudy. The new release will also support PowerPoint export, not just as static images but as linked data so PowerPoint slides can remain synchronized to the post-processing results referenced in them.

Automotive designers and manufacturers may be interested in HyperWorks 13.0's multi-model optimization capability, which allows you to specify a common design component for a family of vehicles in an optimization study. The company is also bolstering its tools for designing with composite materials -- a common approach in lightweighting projects. Both HyperMesh and HyperForm take the lead in this area by giving users the ability to study and understand composite fiber weaving and draping. The interactive post-processor in the new release lets you select and see the stress level "even down to individual fiber level," says Brennan. He feels, "The new material laws added to RADIOSS and OptiStruct put [Altair] at the forefront of advanced materials."

Mesh Improvement

HyperWorks 13.0 features adaptive wrap meshing, describes by Brennan as "a complete rework of the previous shrink-wrap meshing." This will be particularly useful for creating watertight mesh models with recognizable features based on CAD models, he explains. The new release will use "rapid contouring with caching" to cut down on model reload and processing. The virtual wind tunnel simulator based on AcuSolve is also available in the new version.

In June, Altair completed the acquisition of EM Software & Systems, which developed the FEKO software for "antenna design, antenna placement, electromagnetic compatibility analysis, bio-electromagnetics, radio frequency components, 3D electromagnetic circuits, design and analysis of radomes, and radar cross-section analysis," according to a press announcement. The purchase is an indicator that Altair, already an established name in automotive and aerospace, is adding tools for developing Internet of Things (IoT) products into its portfolio in anticipation of growth in this area. The acquisition may bring Altair new opportunities in consumer goods and life science.

Release 13 may be even more meaningful to the Schramm, the man behind the company's solver technologies. Bonino points out, "As many Germans, he is a soccer fan. So for him 13 is just the Number: Thomas Müller -- one of the heroes of the last FIFA World Cup -- wears it.