Continuous casting presents numerous variables that need to be analyzed to improve technology and advance the boundaries of steelmaking. The process involves transforming a constant stream of liquid steel into endless strands of solid metal, which requires precise control to minimize waste and improve yield. The challenge is to understand and simulate the complex processes involved in continuous casting, including fluid flow, solidification, and mechanical deformation, to achieve superior quality and cost efficiency.

The performance and durability of lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries are heavily influenced by their operating temperature. Their performance decreases at low temperatures while the battery degrades quickly at high temperatures. This means that overall reliability is compromised, creating a potential safety issue. Industry research has led to standards regulating the ability of a battery to withstand fluctuations in temperature when it is in operation. In contrast, there has been much less focus on the temperatures that batteries are exposed to during the manufacturing process, which includes plasma pretreatment, UV curing, laser welding, ultrasonic joining, hot stacking, and hot gluing. A Li-ion battery may contain thousands of individual cells, which have to be stacked together. This is typically done through an assembling procedure that may involve various heat treatments, some of which can be extremely intense and expose the casing or other parts to high temperatures for short times. Gerd Liebig of NEXT ENERGY EWE Research Centre for Energy Technology at the University of Oldenburg, Germany, explained, “It is already well known that certain processes such as welding greatly increase the temperature within a battery. What is not known is the extent to which such elevated temperatures could propagate within and compromise a cell.”

HARMAN, a market leader in connected car setups, faces the challenge of designing unique audio configurations for each vehicle model. The process involves accounting for various components and car acoustics, such as speaker placement, orientation, and packaging. Traditional methods of physical testing and in situ listening are time-consuming and costly. The need for a quicker, more efficient development process that can keep up with the rapid pace of vehicle design is paramount. Engineers at HARMAN sought a solution that would allow them to virtually 'tune' their audio systems before creating live prototypes, thereby saving time and resources.

Look at any industry today, from automotive design to consumer electronics, and you will find a common thread that binds them together: the demand for more innovative technology. The latest and greatest technologies are continuously surpassed by even more complex and intricate devices that offer advanced features and functionality. Numerical simulation tools are a viable solution to the challenge of creating more elaborate devices quickly, delivering results with real-world accuracy without the need for building prototypes for each design modification. Some organizations, however, may not have the resources to bring a simulation expert on board to help create and modify models. This is where simulation applications come in. These customized user interfaces are built around numerical simulations of physics-based systems and allow an end user to run multiphysics analyses set up for them by simulation specialists.

The primary challenge faced by the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) researchers was to design a compact nuclear fusion machine, the Advanced Divertor eXperiment (ADX), capable of sustaining reactor-level heat fluxes and magnetic fields. The ADX needed to simulate the conditions of a full-scale fusion reactor while being a research and development testbed. The design had to withstand high temperatures, magnetic fields, and plasma disruptions, which are significant sources of stress. Plasma disruptions, particularly vertical displacement events (VDE), pose a severe threat as they generate large eddy currents and Lorentz forces that can cause substantial stress and displacement in the vacuum vessel. The researchers needed to ensure that the ADX could survive these conditions without structural failure.

The primary challenge faced by FUJIFILM Dimatix was to design unimorph diaphragm actuators for their newest ink deposition products. These actuators needed to be miniaturized to reduce costs while maximizing deflection and matching the actuator's impedance to the flow channels and nozzle. The goal was to generate a droplet meeting a target mass at a given velocity with a target maximum firing frequency for the available voltage. The complexity of the design required a deep understanding of the interactions between the piezoelectric materials and the surrounding components, necessitating a robust simulation approach to optimize the design parameters.

The furniture industry requires rigorous testing to ensure products meet safety and quality standards. This process is costly and time-consuming, often resulting in significant expenses for manufacturers when designs fail. An independent test house aimed to reduce this burden by providing a virtual testing tool to predict whether chair designs would pass or fail before physical testing.

In the electronics and computer hardware industry, optimizing the design of high-speed interconnects in printed circuit boards (PCBs) is a significant challenge. As electronic devices become smaller, the size and spacing of package interconnects must be scaled down, making computational design optimization more time-consuming. Higher frequency interconnects consume more power, and the geometry and materials of these interconnects need to be redesigned to minimize power consumption and prevent signal loss. This is particularly crucial for PCBs, which are used in a wide range of electronic devices. Full-wave electromagnetic simulation is necessary to model signal propagation in these interconnects, but solving the complete set of Maxwell’s equations without simplifying assumptions is computationally intensive. This complexity is compounded by the need to account for non-negligible electromagnetic couplings and impedance mismatch in complex 3D structures, which can cause crosstalk and reflection, compromising signal integrity.

The challenge for Brüel & Kjær is to design industrial and measurement-grade microphones and transducers with a known and consistent error range, even over extended periods. The company must meet diverse industry sound and vibration challenges, from traffic and airport noise to car engine vibration, wind turbine noise, and production quality control. This requires designing microphones and accelerometers that adhere to various measurement standards. The goal is to achieve high precision and accuracy in their devices, which is critical for their customers, including major companies like Airbus, Boeing, Ferrari, Bosch, and NASA.

Dynamic, textural, and symbolic; whether they ambitiously defy gravity or grow organically from the landscape, iconic buildings frequently involve complex façades. Designed not only to protect, they also regulate variables such as thermal and visual comfort. From solar studies that allow optimization of the shading design in order to reduce cooling loads and maximize visual comfort, to the way in which fixing brackets for rainscreen cladding affect the integrity of the insulation, there are numerous challenges that can be resolved with the help of simulation.

Anisotropic materials behave differently depending on the direction they are loaded, but current methods of material production offer limited control over anisotropy. This limitation makes it difficult to exploit the advantages of anisotropic materials for product design. Researchers at TNO aimed to develop a procedure for designing manufacturable anisotropic structures using stiffness and topology optimization techniques. They sought to create materials with specific properties, such as twice the stiffness in one planar direction compared to another, and to extend these capabilities to multimaterial structures. The challenge was to optimize the local distribution and orientation of materials at the microlevel and then scale these optimizations to larger devices while maintaining feasible computation times.

One of the challenges of shaped metal deposition (SMD) is that thermal expansion of the molten metal can deform the cladding as it cools, resulting in a final product that is different than what was anticipated. To predict the outcome of a proposed design, it is necessary to either minimize the deformations or alter the design to account for them. This requires solving a time-dependent coupled thermomechanical analysis that predicts residual thermal stresses and deformation, which arise from SMD thermal cycles.

Engineers at ETREMA Products, Inc. face the challenge of designing devices using magnetostrictive materials, which change shape when exposed to a magnetic field. These materials are crucial for the production of transducers, sensors, and other high-powered electrical devices. The unique properties of magnetostrictive materials, such as their ability to mechanically respond to magnetic fields and their characteristic nonlinearity, make designing these devices complex. The challenge is to accurately represent the material properties and complex physics interactions within such devices to facilitate the production of the next generation of smart products.

Food companies face the challenge of achieving the right moisture and texture in puffed snacks to ensure customer satisfaction. The process of puffing rice involves complex physics, including mass, momentum, and energy transport, rapid water evaporation, material phase transition, pressure buildup, and plastic deformation. Companies need to optimize processing conditions to ensure consistent texture, flavor, moisture content, and food safety. The research team at Cornell University, led by Prof. Ashim Datta, aimed to model the dynamics and material behavior during the puffing of parboiled rice to address these challenges.

Deep space and the human body present unique challenges for designing devices that can operate safely, reliably, and efficiently. Equipment used in extreme environments such as aqueous conditions, severe temperatures, and high pressure levels often struggle with stable and efficient power generation. The search for better power efficiency in devices like deep-space satellites and medical equipment has identified electron emission as a potential method for power generation. Electron emission occurs when a metal surface or electrode is subjected to an electrostatic field, heat, or incoming light, causing electrons to escape the metal and be collected for usable electricity. The Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) and the European Space Agency (ESA) are collaborating to develop systems based on electron emission for solar power collection on deep-space satellites. Researchers at IIT are also applying similar concepts to power nanoantennas for studying electrical signals in the brain.

Anyone who has slept near an airport will know the sensation — an early morning flight wakes you from sleep, not only because the engine is noisy but also because everything around you seems to be shaking. Likewise, people living near wind turbines, military sites, or hospitals with helicopter landing pads often complain that windows rattle and everyday objects buzz when there is external noise. More puzzling for them is the fact that even when they can discern no sound, they may still notice irritating vibrations. If the response of the sound is 20 vibrations per second (20 Hz) or less, it is described as infrasound, meaning that the original sound is not usually audible to the human ear. The effects, however, are very easy to detect. As waves hit windows, spread to the floor, and affect internal walls, they induce a noticeable indoor vibration. Low-frequency sound waves are notorious for their potential to create annoying disturbances. Noise is part of modern life and there are formal standards that use sound pressure level measurements to recognize high-frequency sound waves at levels of sensitivity, intrusion, and danger for humans. According to Finn Løvholt of the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute (NGI), the generation of building vibration due to infrasound is an area of research that has not been explored extensively. For this reason, NGI, an international center for research and consulting within the geosciences, has been running investigative programs for several years on behalf of the Norwegian Defence Estate Agency.

The modernization of the electrical grid to a 'smart grid' involves not only IT and embedded systems but also the critical 'nuts and bolts' components like transformers, cable joints, terminations, bushings, and fault current limiters (FCLs). These components are essential for the grid's reliability and efficiency. The challenge lies in engineering these parts to handle increased voltages and power ratings while minimizing size and cost. Additionally, the adoption of superconducting fault current limiters (SFCLs) faces technological and business hurdles, including the high cost of cooling and the complexity of integrating these devices into the grid.

Other options for wireless energy transfer require precise device positioning on a pad or holder, very close proximity to the charging source, and the source can only charge a single device with a single coil. WiTricity engineers aimed to overcome these limitations by leveraging magnetic resonance to enable more flexible and efficient wireless power transfer. They needed to design a system that could charge multiple devices simultaneously, over distances, and through various materials, while maintaining high efficiency and low power losses. Additionally, they faced the challenge of making the technology scalable for a wide range of devices, from smartphones to electric vehicles, and ensuring that the system met safety regulations for electromagnetic fields.

Observing and analyzing regions in outer space where new stars and planets are born requires extremely sensitive detectors. Radiation and overheating can cause these detectors to fail. Using multiphysics simulation, a team at SRON is developing a calibration source for an imaging spectrometer that can operate with such vulnerable equipment. Heat management takes on a unique role in outer space, especially for cryogenic systems that demand extremely low temperatures in order to detect thermal radiation. This was a challenge faced by the engineering team at SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research when designing the SpicA Far-InfraRed Instrument (SAFARI), an infrared camera that measures the complete far-infrared spectrum for each image pixel. SAFARI will fly aboard the Japanese Space Infrared Telescope for Cosmology and Astrophysics (SPICA). SPICA will look deeper into space than any space telescope has before. Because SAFARI has ultrasensitive detectors, cooled to slightly above absolute zero, it can pick up weaker far-infrared radiation than previous space cameras. Precise on-ground and in-space calibration is crucial to the accuracy of the sensors and the success of the mission. To design and optimize these calibration systems, the team at SRON turned to a COMSOL Multiphysics® simulation as their guide.

The desire to eliminate batteries and power lines is motivating a wide range of research. In the quest for systems that are energy autonomous, the concept of energy harvesting is attracting a great deal of attention. For researchers at Siemens Corporate Technology in Munich, exploring the potential of an energy-harvesting microelectromechanical system (MEMS) generator holds strong appeal. The researchers chose to design a microgenerator for an innovative tire pressure monitoring system (TPMS) driven by motion. Yet locating the device within the tire requires that the assembly be extremely robust and able to withstand gravitational accelerations up to 2500 g. Moreover, to avoid tire imbalance it would have to be very light, and in terms of operational life it would need to match that of a tire—a minimum of eight years.