Design and Optimize Structures from Idea to Reality

Dear DE Reader:

Leveraging advanced materials to reduce weight while increasing stiffness, strength and efficiency cost-effectively is the mantra in structural design optimization. But you have to do your job under tight deadlines while leveraging a shotgun marriage of design, CAE and optimization tools. Today's Check it Out link takes you to a web page introducing the combination of two heavyweight engineering solutions that'll bring together optimization-led design for structural designs from concept to production.

Here’s the elevator spiel: The collaboration combines ETA’s Accelerated Concept to Product Process with BETA CAE Systems’ ANSA multidisciplinary engineering preprocessing platform. They call the solution ACP OpDesign—Accelerated Concept to Product Optimization with Design.

ACP OpDesign is intended to help engineers optimize designs in a diverse range of applications in such industries as automotive, aerospace, packaging, appliances and so on. It aims to help you make your structural products more efficient while meeting or exceeding performance requirements.

Some backfill: While ETA is well-known for its commercial simulation tools like DYNAFORM for die analysis and VPG for system simulation, its ACP process is driven by its highly regarded engineering services unit. The incomplete brief on ACP is that it's an optimization-led, performance-driven product design and development methodology. ACP lets you start from the initial design space and perform multidisciplinary topology optimization to get a concept design. Next, it will allow you to parameterize the design concept and evaluate hundreds of design concepts under multiple load conditions like manufacturing constraints, mass, materials and costs simultaneously for the optimum geometry, grade and gauges.

Now, BETA CAE Systems’ ANSA offers deep specialization in parameterization and optimization setup. In particular, it lets you use morphing parameters as design variables during shape, topology, material and other optimizations.

The merger of ACP and ANSA technologies means, broadly, that ACP OpDesign widens your design space by synchronizing your CAE, design and manufacturing potential. From your earliest design iterations, it helps guide you toward finding the right balance of structure, strength and performance by evaluating hundreds of designs for such considerations as mass, cost and manufacturability. Geometry changes or material substitutions aren't a problem, nor is interfacing with widely deployed design, CAE and manufacturing systems.

ACP OpDesign represents the first commercial product deploying ETA's ACP Process. It'll be released before the end of the year or early next year. So for right now, hit today's Check it Out link for more details.

Thanks, Pal. – Lockwood

Anthony J. Lockwood

Editor at Large, DE