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September 2008 |
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| Werner Seibert, Automotive Segment Manager What trends are affecting the way users use your software? The adoption of Simulation has continued to grow as it has increasingly become recognised as a mission-critical part of product design and development. There are driving forces such as customer expectations, the need for innovation, the relentless pursuit of lower cost, liability concerns, and in general, much more intense global competition in most industries. Yet at the same time, certain factors are working in the opposite direction: available labour, product life cycle, and the pressure to bring things to market faster. All of this says the margin for error these days is smaller and smaller, and the cost of being wrong can be disastrous…. How is this affecting the way you will design the next generation of your software? In a recent study, it was clearly shown that the best performing companies have fully embraced simulation and analysis up front in their product development processes. Our mission at ANSYS is to facilitate Simulation-Driven Product Development ™ . This means providing the tools our customers need to make their use of engineering simulation as user-friendly, efficient and effective as possible. ANSYS, more than any other simulation company, has invested in both developing our own high-capability software codes and acquiring the best of other simulation tools to ensure we have the broadest simulation offering with the highest accuracy and capability possible. This continues with the completion of our acquisition of electronics simulation specialist, ANSOFT on July 31 st 2008. ANSYS has always believed in delivering a genuine multiphysics environment – something we have achieved - that allows customers to account for the entire range of physics found in the real world. Such a comprehensive picture is essential if Simulation-Driven Product Development is to be a reality. Future efforts will focus on continuing to expand the depth and breadth of our software. However, we also want to continue to focus on making simulation as easy as possible. We will continue to develop our Workbench platform for completely integrated multiphysics simulation, which, for example, allows you to view FEA and CFD simulation results on the same geometry. We are also doing further work on delivering universal geometry meshing and post-processing tools for all our software products to make multiphysics simulation hassle-free.
Another major development has been the launch of Engineering Knowledge Manager (EKM), a data and process management tool specifically designed to handle the huge amounts of data that can be involved with simulation. Scalability – providing simulation tools for everyone from the single-person enterprise looking for upfront, easy-to-use simulation, to the multinational corporation requiring the most advanced and complex simulation capability possible – is a big focus for ANSYS. We have software tools that cover this range for each simulation domain and we will soon be extending the scope of EKM to be fully scalable, too, with a version specially tailored to the single person enterprise. Evidence from customer surveys, customer testimonials and renewed software licenses backs up the fact that we are succeeding in the above enabling us to deliver world-class technology to our customers, so they can expand their own business through innovation. Are there any simple ways you see for automotive engineers to improve the intelligence of their development processes? We believe that it is important, and will become increasingly so, to do real multiphysics analysis of engineering designs. That’s the way the real world is, the possible “stack-up” effect of errors, handed from one analysis domain to another, will be reduced by this. True virtual prototyping can’t be done unless a coupled physics approach is adopted. This and only this will finally reduce the need for costly physical prototyping. We put all of this together in a cohesive, unified environment, which we call Workbench. It allows all of this to work together seamlessly, share data, and be part of automatable workflows. We also make everything scalable in a number of ways. The level of the technology engineers need, the number of users, and to the availability of compute resources within a company, desktop to high performance compute clusters. What’s holding your software’s ability back? First of all companies need to fully embrace the simulation driven approach to their process design. A fresh look at the existing simulation process chain and its numerous elements is necessary. Often inadequately coupled steps of independent pieces of software, using historically grown interfaces are still operational, but in fact slowing down the overall efficiency of the engineering process. In terms of our own software, we continue to invest heavily in R&D to develop more models and to get better simulated results across different physics. We work closely with our hardware partners and software partners to explore methods to improve performance, such as improving parallel processing. This last point on parallel processing is particularly salient. The real issue holding our software back from what it could potentially achieve is compute power. Any simulation software is limited by the computational capacity for solving solutions that is available, although today’s lap-tops are sufficient to run many simulations that are commonly required. But incredibly complex, large simulations are possible only if the computer capacity is there. This is why High Performance Computing (HPC) is potentially so exciting. Simulations of over a billion cells and beyond could be possible running our software on an HPC platform. We have worked with our hardware partners to design our software to run extremely efficiently in parallel, which is essential for performing simulations using HPC hardware. That’s why organisations like BMW Sauber F1 Team have chosen ANSYS software for their CFD programme using their supercomputer. Organisations in other industries could benefit from running our software using HPC, too; it just needs the hardware capacity to be available.
What are you doing to make the software more useful to engineers? Engineers are used to software companies making bold claims for functions and features, only to find that they just don’t fit in with their individual working practices. What are you doing to address this? Our whole focus is on providing whatever type of software tools an engineer requires, at the level of capability they want (scalability), all within an integrated platform. Our software also features customisable interfaces to suit a particular customer’s needs. All this together ensures that our software fits in with individual working practices. We enable the speed up of design and development cycle times by providing tools for workflow management and optimizing designs. We want to enable engineers to work collaboratively, worldwide if required, and provide them the tools for data and process management, system access controls, and in fact, a complete methodology and set of tools for knowledge management. That’s why we developed Engineering Knowledge Manager, again, with a focus on making the engineering simulation process as efficient and effective as possible.
What is the next big step for your software? Are there any added functions, inter-operability or neat features that will make it easier for engineers to get their work done better and quicker? How will it improve engineers’ working lives and products? How could you help them work better with other departments, disciplines and companies? A very hot topic these days is this whole area of simulation and process data management, or SPDM Recent studies have shown, that in almost 50% of the case, there were only informal or ad hoc ways of capturing data, and then archiving it for future use. Some companies literally have very valuable data sitting in the desktop machines of their engineers. The highly valuable process knowledge may reside only in the heads of the most experienced engineers in the company, so what happens if they retire, or join another company? What this translates to is essentially lost information and knowledge, as much as 75% by some estimates. This constitutes a substantial risk to a company. Engineering Knowledge Manager or EKM is the ANSYS approach to ensure that this does NOT happen. How do you see the software industry evolving in the next five years? How are you reducing your development cycles and improving the quality of new launches? Do you expect to see more mergers and acquisitions in your field? What effect will this have on the car industry? Our vision of Simulation Driven Product Development remains our focus based on what our customers and other sources of information have told us. The execution of this vision will enable the Innovation, Speed and Quality that are so important to our customers if they want to remain competitive and remain or become Industry Leaders. This does not imply incremental improvements. We are talking about gains in the areas of 10x to as much as 100x in these areas. Simulation Driven means that simulation is done first. Historically you could say that the product development process was Simulation Assisted and today many of our customers are talking to us about how they become Simulation Driven. Clearly this is not easy. It requires many things to happen in the development and integration of technology to the way the technology is implemented within the environment. We develop or acquire the very best advanced technologies that we can, as the fundamental building blocks of our portfolio. We couple them together in a flexible, multiphysics capability, that allows our customers to simulate complete systems or subsystems in a virtual prototype within the computer. By building product design and development processes that utilize these techniques right up front, significant process efficiency and cycle time reduction can be realized. And finally, in today’s world of globally distributed engineering organizations, we can enable multiple engineers to collaborate on the same set of problems, working off a common infrastructure and a common set of simulation data. Going forward, our goal of course is to continue to expand the depth and breadth of engineering simulation technologies and applications, resident within ANSYS Workbench, and fully integrated and interoperable with each other. The capabilities of Workbench itself, as well as the common applications of CAD, geometry and meshing, all will continue to be significantly enhanced as we continue this strategy.
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ANSYS software is used by literally hundreds of engineers across all tiers in the European automotive industry during all steps of research, development, design and optimisation, handling all the diverse simulation tasks thereby incurred. Our software offers a comprehensive capability across all domains - Structural, Fluids, Thermal or Electronic Design Automation – enabling us to address every application area. The main uses would be for analyses in aerodynamics, powertrain, noise reduction, de-misting/fogging of windscreens, internal ventilation and brake cooling. However, new and challenging applications are always arising such as the development of alternative propulsion systems to reduce CO 2 emissions, with our software being used to design exciting technologies such as fuel cells, H 2 in-cylinder combustion and electric drive systems. LINKS Ansys: multi-physics analysis pays off. Read more... Integrated: Electromagnetic CAE tools that combine FEA and simulation. Read more... Lotus: vehicle dynamics made quick and easy. Read more...
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