A detailed study conducted by a student from Universidad Pontificia Comillas ICAI in Spain highlighted the need for ecologically safe and sustainable products. While recycling plays an important role in the circular economy, many consumers don’t recycle for a variety of reasons, including lack of space, inconveniently located recycling centers and collection containers, or distrust and/or disbelief in the recycling process. Organizations needed a model that made recycling easier and more accessible for everyone.

On the e.Deorbit proposal, Airbus DS engineers addressed these concerns by using system modeling to simultaneously develop the mission requirements and architectures. They developed a SySML model that integrates the safety and architecture requirements, system capabilities, functional architecture, and concept of operations (CONOPS).Developing the architectures and requirements in parallel helped to validate the requirements at an earlier stage in the project, saving considerable time and money. While this approach was a major step forward, Airbus DS engineers recognized that its benefits were limited by the fact that the domain simulations required to support the development of the architectures were each run manually and separately by engineers responsible for a particular domain.The results from these simulations were later uploaded to a database and used as input parameters for the system model and other simulations.The performance of the entire system for a particular use case is not clear until each of the simulations involved is completed which takes days or weeks. Considerable time and effort are required to simulate the performance of the entire system for even a single case, limiting the number of cases that can be run in the architecture definition phase.This creates the potential for errors and unexpected interactions that cost considerable time and money to correct when they are discovered later during the detailed design stage.

GE Aviation, a renowned name in the aerospace industry, recognized the potential of 3D printing technology in transforming the sector. The primary challenge was to reduce the weight of the aerospace parts, which would directly impact the fuel costs. A lighter airplane would mean lower fuel consumption, leading to cost savings and a smaller carbon footprint. However, achieving this weight reduction without compromising the strength and functionality of the parts was a significant challenge. Traditional manufacturing methods were not able to provide the desired weight reduction while maintaining the required stiffness and strength of the parts. The challenge was to find a solution that could create strong, light, and functional aerospace parts.

The global bank, based out of North America, was facing a significant challenge in managing its report repository connected to dozens of applications and database systems used across the enterprise. The bank, serving close to 20 million customers worldwide, had to manually download hundreds of thousands of reports from these applications to a centralized location for use on a weekly basis. The file formats were typically unstructured data, usually in text or PDF, with no consistency in report formats across the different applications, or even for reports created using the same application. End users would then manually copy data from the text / PDF formats to Excel-based reports used for reconciliation, attestation, financial reporting, journal entries and other uses. This process was time-consuming, prone to human error, and inefficient.

The architecture industry is witnessing a trend of taller and more elaborate buildings, with the world’s tallest skyscraper, the Burj Khalifa, standing at 828 meters. This height brings unique challenges, particularly in transporting people from the ground floor to the top efficiently. Traditional elevator systems, which operate via cable systems located at the top floor of the building, offer a maximum ride height of up to 400 meters, just half the distance of the world’s tallest building. This necessitates passengers to ride two or more elevators to reach the top level. ThyssenKrupp Elevator, a leading elevator company, developed an elevator that uses electro-magnetic drives attached to the cabin frame, eliminating the need for roof-mounted cables and allowing the elevator to travel the full 800-meter distance. However, this new system could not carry as much weight as a traditional elevator. The challenge was to ensure the new design was as lightweight as possible to maximize the loading capacity of the cabins.

Mahindra & Mahindra, a global pioneer in the transportation business, faced a significant challenge in managing and analyzing the vast amounts of data generated by multiple IT systems. These systems, which include Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), Systems, Applications and Products (SAP) and Tool Data Management (TDM), are integral to the company's automotive, aerospace, and agribusiness operations. Each system generates specific data throughout the product life cycle, requiring collection and analysis to facilitate key decision-making. The challenge was to create a standardized decision support system that could consolidate data from these multiple sources and present the right information at the right time to the right person. The company needed a solution that could interlink all these systems for a properly functioning parent system, enabling collaboration between product and manufacturing engineering, cost and legacy systems.

Alstom, a world leader in integrated railway systems, was faced with the challenge of optimizing an existing component design to be manufactured with casting or alternatively with additive manufacturing technologies. The component in question was a part used in Alstom's Metropolis units in the train bogies to support the anti-roll system. The initial design of the part was found to be much too strong for the workloads it was subjected to, and the safety factor was also a little too high. Alstom's engineers were tasked with improving the design of this existing cast part, with a specific focus on optimizing it for production with metal additive manufacturing. The challenge was to improve the overall design while optimizing material usage, and to explore new production options with additive manufacturing.

The aerospace industry is constantly seeking ways to reduce aircraft weight for improved performance and reduced fuel costs. SOGECLAIR aerospace, a major supplier for the aerospace industry, was faced with the challenge of finding a new development and manufacturing approach to reduce weight while ensuring safety. They were particularly interested in exploring a new concept for an engine pylon, a critical component that holds an aircraft engine to the wing or fuselage. The challenge was to create a design that would not only reduce weight but also maintain the part’s stiffness and reduce the overall number of system parts, leading to reduced assembly time.

Stanley Robotics, a deep tech company, aimed to revolutionize the vehicle logistics industry by introducing autonomous robots to move cars in storage compounds. The challenge was to develop a robot that was fast, reliable, and efficient to meet the demands of the car logistics industry. The robot needed to be designed with mechanical optimization in mind to compete effectively with traditional car logistics companies. Stanley Robotics needed to prove that its robotic vehicle could achieve a significant number of moves per year and demonstrate its durability. To achieve this, the company needed a partner to help develop a digital twin of their robot to calculate all the demands placed upon it and validate their product through durability calculations.

HYCET Transmission Technology Hebei Co. Ltd (HYCET), a comprehensive enterprise focusing on E-drive systems, faced a significant challenge in troubleshooting gearbox mechanical failures. These failures, including pitting, erosion, and peeling, were primarily caused by insufficient lubrication. Given that E-drive speed can reach up to 20,000 rpm, HYCET needed a solution that could accurately calculate churning losses. The company also needed to consider factors such as windage effects, oil volume, and the amount of air bubbles (aeration) present in oil. The challenge was to find a solution that could provide detailed insights into these complex flow phenomena and help the team answer vital questions related to oil flow and potential leaks.

Esterline Advanced Sensors, a leading provider of aeronautic sensors, faced a significant challenge in the development of their products. Each sensor is a unique project for a specific customer, with individual requirements that often change during the development process. This necessitates multiple iterations on design changes and intensive simulations to ensure the final product meets the customer's needs. The sensors, composed of several sub-parts and different materials, grow into complex models when prepared for simulation. The efficiency and reliability of the simulation heavily depend on the mesh features and quality of these models. The challenge was to quickly incorporate required modifications into the current model, create models from scratch, and quickly adopt modifications for design variants, all while maintaining high quality and reducing calculation time.

Ford's Numerically Intensive Computing Department (NIC) had built a substantial heterogeneous High-Performance Computing (HPC) environment over the years, combining both capacity and capability. This environment included Beowulf clusters based on Xeon, Itanium, and Alpha processors, SGI Origin and Altix servers, IBMP650 capacity, and large SMP Cray systems. While this infrastructure enabled NIC to process compute-intensive jobs in a timely manner, it also resulted in a complex infrastructure of platforms and applications. Additionally, NIC faced complexity on the solver side, running many application versions, none of which ran on all architectures. The challenge was to find a solution that could efficiently manage this complex infrastructure and provide a simple tool for users.

APEL Extrusions Limited, a full-service extrusion manufacturer specializing in aluminum extrusion and finishing, was facing a significant challenge in testing die extrusion performance while limiting time and cost. The company, which has a presence in both Canada and the United States, provides aluminum extrusions for a variety of applications including residential and commercial construction, HVAC systems, recreational vehicles, and consumer goods. The aluminum extrusion industry has been experiencing an increased demand for flat rolled and extruded aluminum products, primarily from the transportation sector. This trend, expected to continue through 2020, has put pressure on companies like APEL to adapt to customer needs while maintaining high-quality solutions that meet extremely tight tolerances. A critical step in APEL's process of providing high-quality products is the testing phase that occurs before the actual extrusion process begins.

Amcor Rigid Plastics, a leading product supplier for various packaging segments, was facing challenges in maintaining a balance between packaging performance, environmental impact, and shelf appeal while keeping costs to a minimum. The company was under pressure to create more environmentally friendly products. Amcor was also looking for innovative and lightweight container designs that would be aesthetically pleasing and easy to handle for the consumer without compromising on quality, performance, or safety. The company was using Altair’s HyperWorks suite to create accurate finite element models of the concept designs from the CAD teams to assess their performance in the virtual world. However, they wanted to explore ways to accelerate the engineering and analysis tasks associated with the development of new packaging products. The virtual test process used to investigate the performance of new packaging designs under various loading and impact scenarios was consuming a large amount of the simulation team’s time.

Unilever, a consumer goods giant, was faced with the challenge of reducing the environmental impact of their products. The company needed to find a way to minimize the material used in its packaging while ensuring that it remained strong enough to withstand transportation loads and a variety of use conditions. The challenge was to optimize Unilever’s packaging designs using advanced virtual simulation technology. However, at the time, Unilever did not employ many computer aided engineering (CAE) users, instead having an extremely talented team of CAD engineers at their disposal.

Airbus Helicopters' Weight & Balance (W&B) team was faced with the challenge of collecting and analyzing data to predict the weight of a product during the conceptualization phase. The team had to gather relevant and current data from a broad range of stakeholders in a standardized manner. However, this process was proving to be a hurdle, slowing down both the data interrogation and the subsequent decision-making process. The manual data upload system did not allow for the creation of a standardized report that could be updated in real time, either internally by the different product development departments or externally by suppliers. Altair was tasked with creating a solution to these problems.

Baker Hughes, a leading supplier of oilfield services, products, technology, and systems, faced a significant challenge in validating an advanced oil well liner. The company's customers operate in a challenging market, drilling offshore in deep water and arctic regions, perfecting shale and hydraulic fracturing techniques, and consistently complying with strict environmental and safety regulations. They also have to manage technological challenges such as ever-deeper wells, extreme pressures and temperatures, and unconventional geological variations. Product reliability, safety, speed to market, and cost control are all vital to the industry’s success. To remain competitive, oil and gas service companies must ensure that the right products are built reliably and meet customer expectations ahead of those from competitors. The challenge of creating a cost-effective, safe, and reliable expandable liner hanger required the use of simulation throughout the product development process.

The case study revolves around a senior design project undertaken by Christopher Van Damme, a senior undergraduate student in the Department of Engineering Mechanics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The project involved the design and analysis of a coaxial rotor craft, specifically focusing on a composite-made helicopter rotor blade. Rotor blades are critical components of helicopters, providing thrust, lift, and enabling maneuvers. Modern helicopters use rotor blades made of composite material due to their excellent strength-to-weight ratio, damage tolerance, and fatigue life. However, composite material is challenging to compute using analytical methods or reduced order models. Therefore, Van Damme had to apply suitable Computer-Aided Engineering (CAE) tools to cover the required studies, including static, modal, frequency response, and dynamic analysis of the rotor.

Roth McFarlane Hand and Upper Limb Centre (HULC) in London, Ontario, faced a significant challenge in evaluating the biomechanics of bone stresses. The center, under the direction of Dr. Louis Ferreira, PhD, was using human bone specimens that were CT scanned with a high-resolution scanner. This process preserved much of the internal trabecular bone’s microstructure geometry. However, the challenge lay in the fact that many measurements from the experimental models were either prohibitive or impossible to measure directly on the specimen. This was particularly relevant in the case of patients with shoulder arthritis who were often treated surgically by replacing the diseased joint with implants. The center needed a way to simulate how different implant types influence bone stresses, which can influence the longevity of the surgical procedure.

Hussmann India, a provider of tailored food safety solutions, was facing a significant challenge in maintaining the highest performance and quality standards for their refrigerated display cases and refrigeration systems. The company had to conduct extensive analyses of their product designs to identify and rectify even the smallest of design errors early in the design cycle. The highly competitive and price-sensitive nature of the refrigeration industry necessitated the compression of design and development cycle times, while ensuring cost efficiency and uncompromised quality. Hussmann India was also under pressure to ensure that there would be no rise in temperature in the refrigerator due to infiltration, which would directly affect the total efficiency of the refrigerator display case. Another challenge was the cost and time spent on the experimental testing of the refrigerator.

Zaha Hadid Architects, an international architectural design firm based in London, UK, was faced with the challenge of creating a design proposal for the Museum of the 20th Century that would complement the iconic Neue Nationalgalerie. The Neue Nationalgalerie, designed by Mies van der Rohe in 1968, introduced radical new concepts and refined structural detailing. The challenge for Zaha Hadid Architects was to reinvent a similarly radical approach by applying new advances in technology to generate structural and architectural expression. The firm's Computation and Design research group (co|de) was tasked with developing early-design methods that would enable a directed search for physically, economically, and ergonomically feasible solutions within a vast universe of architectural possibilities enabled by digital design and construction methods.

Accuride Corporation, a leading global commercial and passenger vehicle component supplier, faced a significant challenge in their product development process. The creation of a solid hexahedral mesh, a crucial step in developing truck and passenger wheels, was a complex and time-consuming task. This process required an in-depth understanding of advanced meshing techniques and component quality standards. Moreover, the task was so specialized that only a few engineers at Accuride could handle it, leading to potential delays in time-critical projects. The company also struggled to share this meshing knowledge beyond department boundaries, making it difficult to include everyone in the process, especially simulation beginners.

RF2B was tasked with developing a phased array antenna proof of concept design for small cell Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) base stations at 3.5GHz for its customer Menlo Micro, a developer of high-performance RF MEMS switch integrated circuits. The challenge was to achieve enough azimuth and elevation beam steering range with enough grating lobe suppression and higher efficiency. This required high-level design analysis to decide the number of columns and rows, element type, element spacing, angular step size, and amplitude tapering for the antenna array. Another challenge was the overall complexity of the design, requiring a time-efficient antenna array simulation and design methodology that included the feed network. The antenna array also needed to be optimized in its mechanical environment, including the enclosure and radome.

BASF Engineering Plastics, a division of the world's leading chemical company, BASF, is tasked with providing superior engineering design, simulation, and testing support during all phases of the development cycle. The group's primary goal is to provide superior engineering design, simulation, and testing support during all phases of the development cycle. However, the support of various customers in the application of modern materials often demands new concepts that make the advantages of the material applicable. This challenge is further compounded by the need to continually develop modern virtual methods to meet the needs of its customers, as the company believes that mathematical part optimization will broadly gain acceptance as the method of choice in the next few years.

Tesla Motors, a high-profile electric car manufacturer, was seeking ways to optimize its development cycle to expedite the production of high-quality vehicles. A significant challenge was the time-consuming process of preparing the finite element analysis (FEA) model, particularly the connector portion of its CAE model. The Model S sedan, for instance, had over 300 different fixings and more than 6,000 weld points, including welds, bolts, rivets, adhesives, and MIG welds. The most laborious task was recreating these connectors in the CAD model, which could take up to several days. This process was not only inefficient but also prone to errors, as there was a risk of overlooking a MIG weld or adhesive due to the lack of detail in the CAD file about the type of connector used, its mechanical properties, and the panels it was connecting.

The challenge was to develop an effective seismic retrofit design for a hypothetical unreinforced masonry structure. This was part of a bachelor's project by Davide Gamberini, a student at Politecnico di Milano University's ACTLAB, the Architecture Computation and Technology Laboratory. The focus of the project was on unreinforced masonry structures, which are common in historic buildings in Italy. Given Italy's reputation as one of the most earthquake-prone regions in Europe, there was a pressing need to develop improved retrofitting strategies to preserve the country's cultural heritage. The challenge was to analyze the structure of a hypothetical unreinforced masonry building and find structural improvements to enhance the building's seismic performance.

AMETEK, a leading global manufacturer of electronic instruments and electromechanical devices, was contracted by Lockheed Martin to design a portable flight suit chiller unit for the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) program. The chiller unit works with a pilot cooling vest to maintain a pilot’s deep body core temperature at ≤ 100.4° F (38° C). The JSF program aims to deliver affordable, next-generation striker aircraft weapon systems for the U.S. Navy, Air Force, Marines, and allies. Pilots flying these aircrafts are subject to high levels of acceleration – up to 9g – and must wear G-suits to prevent blackouts. To prevent pilots suffering from heat stress in the cockpit and on the ground, portable flight suit chiller units are needed. The design challenge was to monitor multiple variables and develop the code that goes to the controlling device to make those adjustments automatically. The chiller unit must also run within its power limits to prevent damage.

Ford's battery core team was faced with a challenge when working in tandem with vehicle development. The vehicle electrification engineering teams required a highly detailed CAE model of the battery arrays, including each cell and various packaging configurations considered in the design. This detailed model was necessary to predict the robustness of the battery structure using CAE simulation. However, the detailed model, which could grow to several million elements, needed to be significantly simplified when data was passed to full vehicle teams. The combination of a detailed battery model with the complexity of a full vehicle model significantly slowed the cycle time and hindered the ability to run optimization and design exploration for both teams.

Dorel Juvenile, a market leader in child safety in cars, was tasked with the development of a new child seat, the Maxi-Cosi 2wayPearl. The challenge was to redesign a two-way facing safety child seat that could withstand increased loads, fit into a reduced packaging space, and meet the new European I-size safety requirements. The project's initial goal was to modify the existing Maxi-Cosi FamilyFix seat base to add rearward-facing functionality. The increased loads due to the two-way functionality and the reduced and modified packaging space for the seat base presented significant engineering challenges. The more forward position of the support leg required major structural changes. The introduction of a new European wide standard for child safety seats – the I-size regulation – during the course of the project added another layer of complexity, necessitating an almost complete redesign of the seat base.

The production of carbon fiber reinforced plastic (CFRP) components in high volume and economically is a significant challenge due to complex design shapes and primarily manual manufacturing processes. This has limited the production of fiber composite materials to small series or single products. Despite the desirable properties of CFRP components, such as their lightweight potential and excellent mechanical properties, their complex design and cost-intensive manufacturing processes have been a disadvantage. The Fiber Patch Preforming (FPP) method, developed under the leadership of Airbus Group Innovations, enabled the automated production of composite preforms from a software lay-up plan. However, the next challenge was creating a manufacturing facility suitable for mass production and efficient processing of the fiber patches. This led to the SOWEMA research project, which aimed to develop a flexible and fully automated manufacturing process using the FPP method.