Elastic couplings, frequently used in industries like automobile, power, and manufacturing, present a unique challenge due to their nonlinear characteristics, relative rotation, and large cycle number of the radial load. These peculiarities do not allow the usage of the superposition principle of loads, meaning that every possible combination of loads (axial force, radial force, and torsional torque) must be separately considered. This results in a large number of load cases and consequently a large number of strength assessments. The simple assessment of the superimposed stress states, resulting from a single unit load, would lead to false results, possibly showing a higher component strength than in reality, which could result in a failure of the part. Therefore, all load combinations must be simulated and subsequently assessed against the fatigue strength accordingly.

Astec, Inc., a manufacturer of continuous and batch-process hot-mix asphalt plants, was faced with the challenge of developing a more energy-efficient drum dryer that could process a wide range of aggregate types at various tonnage rates. The drying process in asphalt production is energy-intensive, requiring hundreds of tons per hour of wet aggregate rock to be dried in a rotating drum dryer before being coated with liquid asphalt. This process ensures that the asphalt will bind to the rock. Inside the drum, the aggregate is kept in motion by shaped scoops called flights attached to the inner surface, which produce a 'veil' of falling material. Better veiling action improves heat transfer and speeds drying, reducing fuel consumption. However, direct observation of the drum in operation is very difficult, making it challenging to experiment with new flight designs.

Johnson & Johnson, a global healthcare giant, required on-demand compute capacity at scale for its research, particularly for Janssen Pharmaceuticals, which was working on the COVID-19 vaccine. The company needed to easily scale down this capacity when not in use, a feat only achievable with cloud infrastructure. Janssen was operating over 10 production High-Performance Computing (HPC) clusters on Amazon Web Services (AWS), used by scientists and developers worldwide. However, they were seeking an off-the-shelf solution to replace the open-source Grid Engine and a cloud management tool that no longer supported their preferred vendor. The challenges included accommodating existing infrastructure and systems that had evolved over a decade, managing a complex networking setup, and integrating into configuration and change management systems. Furthermore, each cluster was configured differently, adding to the complexity.

HBPO GmbH, a joint venture of global leaders in automotive components, specializes in the development, assembly, and logistics of complete front-end modules for vehicle manufacturers. The challenge lies in the complexity of these modules, which require numerous components like headlights, radiator grille, bumper, front-end carrier, and components of the vehicle’s air conditioning, engine cooling, and crash management system. Depending on customer requests and preset specifications, HBPO covers assembly, development, and systems integration projects. The development and assembly of a front-end module require a wide variety of simulation applications, such as structural analysis, molding simulation, virtual crash tests, material data management, and more. Numerous varying software tools are required, some of which are only rarely used. To cover all these disciplines, it is crucial for HBPO to keep the development costs as low as possible and to have access to the required tools whenever they are needed.

Subaru, a global automobile and aircraft manufacturer, is committed to achieving zero fatal traffic accidents by 2030. To reach this goal, the company needs to continually innovate and ensure high collision safety, which requires conducting Computer-Aided Engineering (CAE) simulations using High-Performance Computing (HPC). Subaru had been maintaining its own HPC environment near its main manufacturing facility in Japan’s Gunma prefecture. However, as the computational processing requirements for simulation increased, the team faced a shortage of power and space for expansion. They started using a private cloud located in a remote data center in Tokyo, which required a dedicated line for user access. Due to the high cost, they decided to evaluate public cloud options and sought recommendations from the Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association’s cloud working group.

SS Global, a firm offering consultancy and IoT integration services, faced a challenge in developing a real-time, detailed picture of the Air Quality Index (AQI) throughout a metropolitan region. They utilized IoT sensor data on temperature, humidity, and concentrations of particulate matter and atmospheric gases. The engineers needed the ability to play back historical data in real time or faster to examine and understand trends and causal relationships between weather, AQI, and other factors. It was also critical for the system to flag irregularities and anomalies in AQI and atmospheric changes that could indicate future problems affecting the local population.

F.tech R&D North America, a world-class certified Tier-1 international automotive systems supplier, was facing a challenge in their reporting process. The company utilizes HyperView to investigate test results, using the data to inform decisions on methods to improve designs. This data is often used to create reports and presentations during the development process, using images and animations generated by HyperView to illustrate particular areas of a component where additional work may be required. However, exporting these assets was a highly manual process of loading in results, positioning the model and taking screenshots. This was time-consuming and took away from the engineers' time to focus on exploring and interpreting the results. F.tech R&D North America wanted a way of automating this process to reduce the time taken to produce project reports.

SEGULA Technologies, an international engineering consultancy, faced a significant challenge in managing and monitoring a vast variety of commercial software licenses across the enterprise. As an engineering service provider, the company extensively uses computer-aided engineering (CAE), computer-aided design (CAD), and other commercial development software. The usage of these software tools varied, with some being used more frequently than others. However, all tools could be utilized on certain projects. The company needed to efficiently manage the peaks and valleys in software usage. Prior to implementing a solution, each business unit gauged its software requirements based on subjective data, leading to inefficiencies and potential overuse or underuse of licenses. The company sought a solution to optimize software usage, improve decisions on software renewal and acquisition, and better manage its IT budget.

Euro-Pro, a rapidly growing consumer products manufacturer, faced a challenge in its product development process. The company's product development was heavily reliant on physical prototype testing, which was time-consuming, costly, and often failed to provide a comprehensive understanding of product behavior during tests such as drops or impacts. The company wanted to increase the use of simulation to conduct more in-depth analysis of scenarios that were difficult or impossible to test physically, such as internal structural failures. The goal was to identify the root cause of product failures more accurately and provide better guidance to the engineering and product design teams. The company also aimed to test materials prior to their introduction on future generation products, with the hope of positively influencing the overall product portfolio direction in terms of market appeal, quality, reliability, and durability.

Scania, an international manufacturer of commercial vehicles and engines, was faced with the challenge of speeding up their design and development processes to produce lighter yet structurally and functionally efficient component designs. The automotive and commercial vehicle industries face many challenges when bringing a new product to market, including CO2 emission regulations and customer demands for more efficient vehicles. There is also high competition and pricing pressure in this market, forcing development teams to speed up their development process to achieve a shorter time to market. Scania's traditional process involved physical testing of prototypes, which led to many iteration loops between design and engineering departments, slowing down the development process.

MAHLE, a leading automotive systems supplier, faced a challenge in making their simulation results reporting consistent, thorough, and simpler to perform. The company conducts simulations for pistons, connecting rods, and pins, with pistons representing the majority of the group's work. The complexity of pistons, which must withstand high temperatures and huge inertia loads, introduces many variables into the design process. Six different engineers were creating slightly different reports, leading to variations in how the simulation story was being told to customers. The main question to be answered by the simulation is whether the piston will survive the engine test. These tests are quite expensive, and a pre-production piston needs to be tested before it is put into the engine to save physical testing costs and to enable more design iterations. The complexity of the evaluation is further increased by factors such as lightweight pistons, high-efficiency engines, highly-loaded four-cylinder engines, more variability, and different materials.

Lockheed Martin, a global security and aerospace company, was faced with the challenge of managing high-performance computing (HPC) resources in multi-level security environments. The company configures systems for the government using Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 cross-domain system (CDS) configurations for multi-level security (MLS). This configuration allows users and data at different security levels to share the same resources, which is particularly useful for the U.S. military and intelligence communities. However, because users at different security levels share the system, Lockheed Martin needed to deploy a resource scheduler capable of operating in an MLS Red Hat Enterprise Linux environment. This would enable the greatest flexibility in setting queue and job priorities, providing automated accounting information, and offering many other capabilities to help each user complete their runs in the appropriate time and with the appropriate priority.

DSM Engineering Plastics, a global provider of high-performance plastics, faced a challenge in the LED lighting applications sector. The heat sinks used in these applications, primarily made of aluminum, were responsible for dissipating heat generated by LEDs to the environment. However, aluminum, despite being a good heat conductor, had limitations such as high costs related to machining die-cast parts, limited design freedom, recyclability issues, and weight. DSM sought to provide a plastic-based solution for heat sinks to overcome these issues. To find an optimal design for the heat sink made of polymer material and predict its thermal performance, DSM needed to model natural convection and radiation cooling, the mechanisms by which LED heat sinks dissipate heat to the environment. The challenge was to find a tool that could accurately simulate these processes and provide reliable results.

SOGECLAIR aerospace, a major partner in engineering and prime contractor for the aerospace industry, was tasked with the development of a new flooring concept for aircraft cabins. The challenge was to create a lighter structure, adjustable panels for all types of aircraft, and ensure easier installation and maintenance. The aerospace industry has always been at the forefront of weight optimization and lightweight design, hence it was not surprising that aerospace also was one of the first industries to use alternative materials such as composites. The engineers had to consider conflicting issues such as weight, design, maximal dimensions, strength, stiffness etc. The use of optimization technology is the solution to combine all of these constrains with respect to an optimal composite layout. In this context SOGECLAIR aerospace investigates innovative materials and processes to integrate them in the design, analysis, and optimization.

The smartphone industry is one of the fastest evolving and most competitive sectors in the electronics industry. New models are developed every few months, and any reduction in time to market can significantly impact a manufacturer's profitability, positioning, and reputation. However, certain aspects of the development process, such as drop-test simulation, have remained time-consuming and resistant to acceleration. Drop-test simulation is a crucial element in ensuring the quality and robustness of a smartphone. Despite using computer simulation for virtual drop testing, LG Electronics (LGE) faced challenges in shortening the simulation time due to the large number of parts and assemblies in smartphones, the time-consuming geometry cleanup, simplification, and meshing, and the multitude of contact definitions that required many manual steps. Thorough testing involves a variety of drop and bending conditions, where analysis setup is time-intensive. Post-processing and generating reports also contributed to the overall time to achieve results. On average, drop-test simulation took one to two weeks to set up, conduct, and analyze, with modeling and post-processing representing 60 to 80 percent of the time invested.

The South African aviation manufacturing solutions provider Aerosud and the South African Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) launched a challenging 3D printing project, Aeroswift, in 2011. The project aimed to unlock the potential of the growing additive manufacturing (AM) industry, improve market competitiveness, and provide South Africa with a unique competitive edge in metal AM. The challenge was to build a large metal Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) frame on the Aeroswift printer, while improving the buy-to-fly ratio and reducing development time and waste. The Aeroswift system was capable of printing much larger parts than ever before, and ten times faster than any other commercially available laser melting machine. However, to fully utilize its capabilities, Aeroswift needed a methodology for designing large additively manufactured products.

NACCO Materials Handling Group (NMHG), a leading producer of lift trucks, was facing a significant challenge in their product development process. The company had been using finite-element analysis (FEA) for 25 years, but this required the construction of several iterations of physical prototypes to test their designs. This process was not only costly but also time-consuming, leading to delays in bringing products to market. The company was in dire need of a solution that could reduce the time to market without compromising on the quality of their products. The ultimate goal was to virtually design, test, and evaluate each product before any physical prototypes were made, thereby saving costs and gaining a competitive advantage.

CIKONI, an innovation-focused engineering company based in Stuttgart, Germany, was faced with the challenge of creating an integrated digital design workflow for Type IV composite pressure vessels (CPVs). The company aimed to develop a comprehensive digital design process and workflow for CPVs, particularly the state-of-the-art Type IV polymer-lined, carbon fiber overwrapped vessels used in vehicles, and reduce the need for extensive, expensive physical testing. The challenges identified with the design of composite pressure vessels were three-fold: complex material behavior, many constituents, and the need for fast results. For accurate simulation, filament winding paths, material anisotropy and nonlinear damage progression needed full consideration. Additionally, expensive testing for each material and process modification was required. Lastly, simple modeling and efficient computation were needed to reduce simulation cost.

CEVA, a leading licensor of wireless connectivity and smart sensing technologies, faced a significant challenge in managing their engineering resources and speeding up their VLSI development flows. As an IP design and licensing company, CEVA's most critical metrics are time-to-market and engineering efficiency. The challenge was to allow the engineering team to work as if they have no constraints, enabling easy access to hardware compute servers, EDA licenses, and automated design flows without exceeding a project’s R&D budget. The team at CEVA selected the Altair Accelerator™ job scheduler for their VLSI workflows to address this challenge.

Annapurna Labs, a fabless chip start-up acquired by Amazon Web Services (AWS), was facing challenges in managing workloads on dedicated Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances. The team could occasionally scale up by manually adding new On-Demand instances, but the process was not automated, leading to inefficiency, forgotten unused compute resources, and either under-scaling or excessive scaling. As a chip design company, time-to-market and engineering efficiency were critical metrics for them. The team needed a solution that could add structure and efficiency to scaling AWS compute resources, shorten time to results, and change the development model to Continuous Integration.

VR Steel (Pty) Ltd, a company that designs, builds, and repairs fabricated mining equipment attachments, including truck load bodies, was faced with a significant challenge. The company aimed to reduce the mass of a truck load body while maintaining its structural integrity and increasing its performance. The challenge was not only to streamline the design process but also to reduce prototyping costs. VR Steel needed a simulation tool that could help them achieve these goals. Their customers also demanded proof that the new design would unload more quickly, lower operating costs, and withstand heavy use. The challenge was to find a solution that could meet all these requirements while also providing a competitive edge in the market.

Porsche AG, a renowned automotive company, was faced with the challenge of improving the total design balance in e-motor development. The powertrain of electric vehicles had to be developed considering an increasing number of internal, customer, and legal requirements. Classical development strategies involved individual development routes for different requirements and different organizational structures responsible for fulfilling these requirements. This led to development taking place in several parallel disciplines, often resulting in negotiations and unfavorable compromises to reach a final acceptable design. Porsche aimed to adopt more integrated and holistic development strategies to better meet future requirements without significant sacrifices on target fulfillment. The challenge was to design optimization strategies that accounted for different requirements resulting from different physical phenomena simultaneously, i.e., multiphysics optimization.

Korg Italy, a subsidiary of the Japanese Korg corporation, specializes in the design and production of high-end digital pianos and electronic keyboards. The company faced a significant challenge in creating these sophisticated musical instruments that required accommodating intricate circuits and mechanisms while maintaining style and elegance. The design process often involved modifications to the internal component design during the product development process. These changes were often necessitated when engineers discovered that an electrical component was of a different size than initially envisaged. Making such alterations at an advanced stage in the product development cycle could lead to considerable costs. Furthermore, the company also had to manage the design of the packaging and cases for these instruments.

XOX Audio Tools, a company that brings high design and advanced technologies to the musical field, was faced with the challenge of creating a completely new electric guitar that not only sounded good but also looked aesthetically pleasing. This was a significant challenge considering the lack of new ideas and features in the musical instrument field. The company wanted to create a unique design that would stand out in the market, while also ensuring that the guitar was functional and performed well. The goal was to find the ideal shape that would meet these requirements.

VTT, a leading research and technology centre in Finland, partnered with Nurmi Cylinders, a Finnish manufacturer of hydraulic cylinder products, to optimise a valve block for demanding industrial applications using Additive Manufacturing (AM). The challenge was to design a valve block that would fully benefit from the AM process, reducing its size and the amount of material needed, and optimising its internal channels to produce a better component for the customer. Traditional manufacturing methods for valve blocks involve forming a block of metal into the desired shape and drilling internal channels to accommodate hydraulic fluid flow. This process is often cumbersome and prone to alignment issues and potential leakage. Furthermore, not every component or product is suitable for AM, depending on its size, form, design, and the quantity needed.

Bajaj Auto, the third largest motorcycle manufacturer and the world’s largest producer of three-wheelers, was facing challenges in managing and controlling its enterprise software assets. With software procurement becoming a rising cost of doing business, software inventory management, license utilization rates, and charge-back accounting became critically important for accurate capacity planning and budgeting. Bajaj Auto's senior management was struggling to 'right-size' their product lifecycle management (PLM) software investments against organizational productivity. The company found it difficult to consolidate the total number of licenses and understand the usage of PLM, CAD, CAE, CFD, and NVH software for capacity planning to support its R&D staff. The company also discovered that up to 25% of procured software was significantly underutilized or not utilized at all. The lack of visibility into distributed systems and minimal accounting for procured software assets further complicated the situation.

Nippon Sharyo, a leading manufacturer of railroad cars in Japan, faced a complex challenge in enhancing the safety and comfort of their bullet trains. The aerodynamic pressures exerted on the trains, especially when entering and exiting tunnels or passing other trains, posed significant safety risks and discomfort to passengers. The pressure wave created when a train enters a tunnel could cause loud noise and vibration, and the collision of pressure waves when two trains pass each other in a tunnel could produce a force strong enough to push one train away from the other. If not properly managed, these forces could potentially derail the train or at least cause a jarring experience for passengers. Other factors such as unsteady loads when trains pass in open landscapes, the impact of crosswinds, noise from the door frame, and ensuring optimal airflow from heating and air conditioning systems also needed to be considered to maximize passenger safety and comfort.

Sicma Aero Seat SA, a French manufacturer of airline passenger seats, faced a significant challenge in the design, manufacturing, and maintenance of its products. The company's seats, which range from simple to sophisticated models with complex electrical and electronic features, had to comply with stringent safety regulations. These regulations required the seats to withstand a crash impact 16 times the force of gravity, translating into tougher design and manufacturing constraints. Additionally, the seats had to appeal to passengers and adhere to various certification and safety regulations, including those related to crash impact. The company also had to meet customer specifications and use a combination of virtual and physical testing to meet appropriate regulations. The challenge was to improve their seating products, cut certification costs, and reduce product development and delivery cycles.

Force Protection, Inc. (FPI), a South Carolina-based company, had developed a new class of military vehicle, the Buffalo, designed for clearing out land mines and Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs). The Buffalo's pioneering design, with a monocoque hull designed to deflect blast away from personnel inside, became the basis of a new U.S. military vehicle design standard known as MRAP (Mine Resistant, Ambush Protected). However, as U.S. military involvement in the Middle East increased, the need for personnel transports that could withstand the kind of anti-insurgency war U.S. soldiers were fighting became apparent. The Army requested FPI to produce a smaller, more versatile version of the Buffalo, which was named the Cougar. This new vehicle had to meet a series of military, SAE, and NTSA standards, requiring documentable analyses to ensure compliance. FPI, however, lacked a formal in-house analysis capability.

Dalhousie University, a public, research-intensive institution in Nova Scotia, Canada, faced a challenge in keeping its mechanical engineering curriculum current with industry demands. The university, which has a strong focus on research and practical design work, was receiving feedback from the industry that students lacked knowledge of fundamental tools such as finite element analysis (FEA). Although FEA was included in the curriculum, it was only an elective course in the final year, taken by a small number of students, and completed after all work terms. The university recognized the need to expose every mechanical engineering student to the basics of FEA at an earlier stage. Furthermore, the university needed to identify state-of-the-art engineering tools and provide support for their implementation in a large-scale program, while managing budgetary constraints.