Automotive Design and Lightweighting Solutions

Automotive & Transportation

Automotive & Transportation

The automotive industry is evolving at an unprecedented pace; a transformation driven by simulation. As a product development partner to the world’s largest OEMs and suppliers, we work to accelerate product development, enhance passenger safety and experience, all while optimizing vehicle fuel economy and durability. Our technologies are changing the way vehicles of all types are designed.

A Common Simulation Language

With overnight aerodynamic simulations, engineers can drive performance improvements without sacrificing design styling. By reviewing studio innovations daily, engineers can explain how a design shapes air flow and designers are able to resolve issues on time and with style.

Cloud Bursting Boosts Vehicle Development Programs

On-demand, high-performance computing (HPC) presents the opportunity to securely scale simulation capabilities during peak demand, satisfying the need for detailed, multi-disciplinary optimization studies on multiple programs to reduce development costs and risk.

Data Analytics Shapes Early Vehicle Design Decisions

Identify the most promising concepts and critical subsets of performance criteria earlier in design exploration and by applying statistical methods for dimensionality reduction on the huge number of design variables considered during a vehicle program.

Accelerate Product Development

Create robust architectures during pre-program: The Altair Concept 1-2-3 (C123) design process enables designers to confidently create innovative, next-generation architectures by using simulation to inform vehicle architecture, manufacturing processes, material selection, and platform strategies.

Leverage high-performance computing: OEMs and suppliers rely on HPC for a faster time-to-market and superior product quality. Altair PBS Works™ is a comprehensive workload management suite for clusters, supercomputers, and the cloud. Altair Access™ lets you remotely visualize and interact with your data and applications, even across networks with challenging latencies.

Drive even more design with simulation: Altair’s next generation HyperWorks experience was created to enable your team to move from physics to physics, domain to domain, and even create reports without ever leaving the model. Every tool in the suite delivers a solution-specific workflow with a meticulously designed and discoverable user-interface.

A Safer, More Comfortable Driving Experience

Increase passenger protection: In the age of autonomy and car sharing, new seating positions demand a fresh investigation of passenger safety using Altair Radioss™, an industry standard for automotive crash, impact, and airbag simulations. Altair MotionSolve™ helps chassis systems achieve vehicle dynamics targets and ensure safe maneuverability. With Altair Feko™, vehicle connectivity and electromagnetic compatibility (EMC), which are essential to today’s vehicles, can be verified.

Improve quality and design performance: Customers expect better vehicle performance, including minimizing noise, vibration and harshness (NVH), and the annoying squeak and rattle (S&R) phenomena. Altair’s NVH Director reduces the full-vehicle NVH simulation time, freeing CAE engineers to optimize product design and performance. Altair Squeak and Rattle Director identifies and analyzes design alternatives to eliminate S&R causes.

Create the optimal environment: In the past, engineers relied on wind tunnel tests during the design cycle to determine the effectiveness of heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems. Altair AcuSolve™ helps make more informed decisions earlier in the design cycle. Using transient computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation, it accurately models the air flow through the HVAC system, ensuring safer windshield defrosting capability, while optimizing the thermal management of electrical and mechatronic systems.

Improved Fuel Efficiency and Durability

Better tools for fuel efficiency: Automakers need a multipronged approach to achieve fuel efficiency, lighter structures, and aerodynamics performance. Altair OptiStruct helps designers and engineers do just that, all while reducing costs and maintaining performance. Altair ultraFluidX improves external aerodynamic performance by applying GPU hardware to speed their decision making.

Durability for fleet or personal use: Future fleets of autonomous vehicles will cover more miles than personal cars for economic reasons: to cover the cost of expensive hardware and increase profitability by driving longer than a human would. Altair HyperLife provides a comprehensive toolset for durability analysis to enable the prediction of fatigue life under the repetitive loadings of a vehicle life. Vehicle durability loads can be extracted from Altair MotionSolve.

Accelerate powertrain electrification: The move towards hybrid and full-electric powertrain systems delivers both business challenges and opportunities. Bringing BEV development cycles into alignment with traditional timelines require changes to engineering team structures and toolsets. Powertrains must be highly efficient and lightweight while meeting new regulations and growing customer expectations. Learn more about e-Mobility.