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September 2008 |
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| Andy Poon, director What trends are affecting the way users use your software? Engineers working on hybrid electric vehicles and dual clutch transmissions need highly accurate simulation of system performance in a very short amount of time. There are novel configurations for transmissions and experience-based knowledge is lacking. This drives them to many, many short iterations to explore the design space and understand the system better. Because of the lack of engine noise at low speeds, gear noise issues are even more important for electric and hybrid vehicles than in traditional vehicles. We can provide noise and vibration predictions early in the design phases that can help evaluate different vehicle concepts. This type of simulation is traditionally only done towards the end of the design process, a long time after the design concept has been frozen. How is this affecting the way you will design the next generation of your software? It’s always better to design out a problem in the concept, rather than during the testing and development stage of a project. So we see the challenge in future will be in utilising predictive analysis technology early in the design phases, even when all the design data is not available. The use of probabilistic and variational analysis can help to explore the design space early, but this must be done in such a way that the complexities of implementing and interpreting the results from such a study can be taken care of by the software.
Are there any simple ways you see for automotive engineers to improve the intelligence of their development processes? Engineers need to understand the trade off between accuracy of simulation result versus the value of the result within the design process. CAE needs to be used appropriately within the design process, and often an 80% accurate result delivered in 20% of the conventional time will have a far more significant affect on the design cost than a 99% accurate result delivered sometime later in the design cycle. Therefore, tools need to be designed that enables sophisticated CAE analysis to be performed "in-line" with the design process. What’s holding your software’s ability back? Organisational barriers that are by far the most significant barrier to efficient use of our software. New simulation methods enable design trade offs to be done across what would traditionally be different departments; these artificial barriers to engineering design can reduce the effectiveness of our software tools. What are you doing to make the software more useful to engineers? Any piece of software needs to be generic enough to be useful to a broad audience, but at the same time it needs to suit the needs of the users within specific target industry or level of user expertise. Intuitive user-interfaces are a key aspect in ensuring software is actually used by engineers, however this only addresses usefulness at a superficial level. An engineer must have confidence in the results of any software simulation and be able to use the results within their design process. What is the next big step for your software? The majority of software products, and in particular within the PLM workspace, follows the same model of upfront license payments to own the software and then smaller recurring maintenance charges. This model has being disrupted in recent years by the influence of the internet and the rise of software usage in countries such as Brazil, Russia, India and China. These markets have a very different view on the value of software and what they are prepared to pay for it, however the markets are huge and growing. Therefore the challenge is to produce software that fits into revenue generating models for these emerging markets; which may be far different from what we in the West are currently used to. In particular, this will change the way that the products within the high end CAE software will evolve in the coming years.
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Our software is used by vehicle OEMs, Tier One transmissions suppliers and component suppliers to evaluate gearbox and axle designs quickly and to reduce gear noise. LINKS Ansys: multi-physics analysis pays off. Read more...
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