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Improving Lightweight Designs Through Simulation

Discover Altair Partner Alliance Applications for Lightweighting Your Designs

How to Avoid Oversized Plastic Parts and Wrong Material Choices in the Design Phase

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Lightweight design often is all about replacing metal parts with plastics. Simulation tools are useful to avoid oversized parts and verify its physical integrity early in the development process. But to do it right, influences of the manufacturing process and the right material choice are essential. During this webinar, this process will be outlined for an injection molded short-fiber-reinforced plastic part. The effects of weld lines, fiber orientation, temperature and more, on the part's strength cannot be ignored. How such influences are easily considered will be shown in this webinar.

Presenter: Sascha Pazour | Engineer, PART Engineering GmbH

Featuring Converse and S-Life Plastics by PART Engineering, available through the Altair Partner Alliance.
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Lightweighting With Laminate Composites: Vibro-Acoustic Design Using AlphaCell

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Laminate composites are often the answer to ever increasing lightweighting demands. While significant advances were made regarding mechanical strength, there remain a number of challenges regarding their vibro-acoustic properties. Composites are indeed lighter and stiffer, which as a result, tends to decrease their sound insulation properties at critical audible frequencies. One thus needs a thorough design of the structure to avoid acoustic comfort failure. During this webinar, a unique approach to predict the vibro-acoustic response of laminate composites will be presented. Supported by short computational times and high fidelity predictions, this new feature of AlphaCell enables to optimize the design at an early stage of the project. In addition to accurate predictions, this model further enables to reduce the computational cost in FE analyzes by providing material cards with condensed properties.

Presenter: François-Xavier Bécot | Director and Executive Co-Manager, Matelys

Featuring AlphaCell by Matelys, available through the Altair Partner Alliance.

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Efficient Placement of Acoustic Treatment for Electric Vehicle Lightweighting

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The hybrid finite element analysis (Hybrid FEA) extends the applicability of finite element models to higher frequencies for vibration and noise simulations. The method has been validated in the past in several automotive applications. In this webinar, we will discuss the workflow of the Hybrid FEA which integrates Altair OptiStruct™ with the Energy Finite Element Analysis (EFEA) code of MES to perform the simulations. A case study will be presented where excitation typical of an electric vehicle motor is considered in frequency ranges above 200Hz. The Hybrid FEA is used for determining the optimal placement and selection of acoustic treatment. The simulations allow to balance the reduction in the interior noise level against the increase in the weight by strategically placing the treatment material on the vehicle body.

Presenter: Nick Vlahopoulos | CTO, Michigan Engineering Services (MES)

Featuring EFEA by MES, available through the Altair Partner Alliance

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New Method for Evaluation of Adhesive Joint Failure Under Cyclic Loads

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In vehicle bodies, bonding has become established for joining a wide variety of materials. However, to date there is no generally applicable method for analyzing the adhesive joint fatigue. In tests performed, a pronounced cohesive crack propagation phase was observed in epoxy layers with high local stress, resulting in high fatigue life differences between crack initiation and total failure. In order, to take this into account, the failure criterion was extended from initiation of technical crack to a local cracked zone.

A new method for determining the utilization degree of cracked zones was developed and calibrated based on experimental S/N curves. Recently, the stand-alone application ClaRP has enabled automatic damage assessment and thus the analysis of adhesive layers in complex finite element models.

Presenter: Manuel Frank | Engineer, Magna Powertrain

Featuring FEMFAT by Magna Powertrain, available through the Altair Partner Alliance

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Efficient High-Fidelity Design and Optimization of Composite Blades Using VABS

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This webinar will demonstrate how one can use VABS through Altair APA to conduct efficient and high-fidelity design and optimization of composite blades. Realistic examples will be used to demonstrate that VABS can be used to match specific blade properties. Linking VABS with a multibody dynamics simulation code, it can also be used to optimize dynamic performances of rotating blades. Significant weight reduction can be achieved by making use of composites in comparison to the benchmark. The versatile modeling capability of VABS can be used to model realistic blades along with needed manufacturing constraints. All the complex three-dimensional stress and strain states within each layer of the composites can be accurately captured using VABS during the rapid optimization process. 

Presenter: Wenbin Yu | CTO, AnalySwift

Featuring VABS by AnalySwift, available through the Altair Partner Alliance

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Enhance Your Design for Additive Manufacturing with Lattice Structures

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Unlike traditional manufacturing, additive manufacturing allows for increased geometric complexity. In order to maximize the added value of additive manufacturing, it's important to create designs that take advantage of this complexity. Using lattice structures to minimize the weight of the parts while maintaining good mechanical properties is one of the advantages.

This webinar will introduce these concepts and show practical examples and uses cases using Materialise 3-matic software.


Presenters: Materialise's Yves Sanchez, Thibault Jacobs, and Michael Walicki

Featuring 3-matic by Materialise, available through the Altair Partner Alliance

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