SourceForge recently caught up with Victor Apanovitch, inventor of the technology and cornerstone of Altair’s SimSolid team to hear about simulation-driven design and understand more about their claim that SimSolid is the game-changing simulation technology for designers, engineers, and analysts.
We’ve been hearing the phrase ‘simulation-driven design’ quite a bit recently, especially from the folks at Altair. Can you define what you mean by ‘simulation-driven design’?
In a nutshell, simulation-driven design puts simulation at the front end of the design process and uses simulation technology to steer the design process instead of using simulation to analyze a final variant.
Inventor of the technology and cornerstone at Altair’s SimSolid
Why is it important for design and engineering teams to use simulation?
A simulation-driven design approach drastically lowers the time companies take to develop products and get them to market. How? Because by putting simulation and validation at the front end, it allows capturing design deficiencies early and drastically reduces late engineering changes which are costly.
Before simulation was used in industry, everyone relied on endless physical testing or over-designing products to get them to market. In the 1960-70s came finite element simulation, which cut down development time because you didn’t have to physically manufacture and test everything – but it is a high-tech solution and needed dedicated specialists to get reliable results.
Today, our brand-new generation of simulation technology used in SimSolid slashes the whole process time because anyone can do simulation early on and at any step in the design cycle.
You don’t need expertise, you don’t need a lot of resources to do it, so it can be done at any stage, and we’ve witnessed significant decreases in our customers’ whole product-to-market time.
Altair has said that SimSolid is a key enabler of the simulation-driven design approach. What is SimSolid and what inspired its creation?
The first thing I’ll say is – SimSolid is fun!
From working in finite element analysis for many years, what the world needed was a structural analysis solution that works directly on CAD geometry, and gives you design insights in seconds to minutes. That’s what SimSolid was born to do.
What we’ve done with SimSolid is to break down the whole barrier of needing finite element experience to run any kind of simulation and to get trustworthy results. You don’t need to know about finite elements or have years of education to get fast, meaningful answers from SimSolid.
Everything in SimSolid is in engineering terms. Avoiding the need for services of experienced, expensive structural analysts, with a background in engineering you can explore and create designs. We’ve truly put simulation in the hands of engineers and designers.
So, what makes SimSolid such a game-changer?
I’m going to use that term we’ve all heard – democratization of simulation. Its true meaning is to make simulation accessible and possible for very broad communities of designers. That’s what SimSolid does – it can be used anywhere, by anyone.
In 50 years FEA became a whole self-contained world with its own terminology, jargon, special techniques, etc. which is overwhelming for “normal” engineers. The entry threshold into FEA is high, but the worst is – 80% of FEA-related activities do not add value. Structural analysts may enjoy the process of doing FEA, but their managers are usually terrified by the time and resources required. That is why FEA usually is a “postmortem” to design, not its governing force.
Let’s look a bit closer at what I’m saying: You create a design in your CAD system. An assembly, say, with different structural members, nuts and bolts or welds holding them together. With SimSolid, this is exactly what you use for simulation, there is no difference between geometry of design and geometry for analysis.
Early on you’ll probably need to look at different options or make a change to a design. Doing that in FEA is a nightmare, but not for SimSolid. That’s when it’s valuable to use a tool that enables rapid exploration of design alternatives.
The geometry used for FEA is always different to the design. To run a conventional FEA, you must remove features like fillets, small holes whatever, otherwise you won’t solve it. For an assembly, it’s much worse because you have to remove nuts, bolts and other connectors, non-structural parts, leaving only the structural ones. But, to do that, you need an expert to know what is and is not structural and know what to remove and what to leave. Then there are boundary conditions, other FEA terminology to understand and interpret to get a sensible result.
I’m not even talking about meshing yet! Let’s face it – nobody likes meshing and we’ve all heard the saying “mesh or perish”, because it’s the most failure prone stage. SimSolid has eradicated this risk totally because there is no meshing.
That’s why for a designer, finite element analysis is so scary because you have to understand all this imagery, these schematics and if not, that means there are too many risks. SimSolid mitigates all this because you don’t throw out anything from the CAD image, you don’t mesh, you just run it as it is in SimSolid.
That’s the game changer. Any company can now afford to do simulation in-house. The smallest of companies can now design and simulate without a specialist team or need to outsource.
You make some lofty claims about SimSolid. Can you explain more about the technology behind it? Is it proven?
Simply put, at the heart of SimSolid is conventional FEA but without finite elements.
We invented new solver technology, but we re-used well-defined FEA formulations – no exotics here. Our technology just has different approximations without finite elements to the solution – truly meshless, unlike others – but the formulations and fundamentals are just the same. That’s why we are confident with benchmarking SimSolid against FEA.
It is important to know that there’s no barriers to SimSolid. Anything that’s possible in FEA can be done in SimSolid. For now, we have thermal and structural analysis, but multiphysics capabilities are coming. There are no limits.
Does this mean the end of finite element analysis as we know it? Totally replace FEA with SimSolid?
That won’t happen because there will always be areas where subdivision into finite elements is required for fundamental reasons like, for instance, explicit FEA schemes.
History shows that faster, better new generation technologies do displace the accepted. Go back 50 years or so, finite difference was a key core technology. Along came finite elements and for a while they coexisted but then it got squeezed out by FEA for all linear problems. It is still used in fluid dynamics in some “heavy-duty” areas, but elsewhere where analysis was relatively simple – it’s gone because FE replaced it.
SimSolid and FEA will coexist. SimSolid has the potential to take over big areas of mainstream analysis from FEA – that’s our sector – but there are plenty of “exotic” places where other solutions from Altair are still the best answer! That’s the power of Altair’s product range, we offer best-in-class for mesh-based and meshless solutions. Coupled with our innovative licensing system it makes everything easier and better because you can use whatever you want when you need it.
Tell us more about Altair SimSolid. What are the key features and capabilities? How does it compare to other software on the market?
Remember, SimSolid is a new generation, unique technology founded on proven formulations to bring a unique product to design engineers. I’m not going to list features here – all that is on our website and how to find it at the bottom of this article. There are some important points of note.
When it comes to comparisons, then it is SimSolid against conventional FEA or so-called “integrated” solutions. These attempt to embed simulation into a CAD package and call it “seamless”. The only benefit of the seamless bit is that being in a native CAD environment makes defeaturing or geometry simplification for analysis easier. You still have to do that, you still need a high level of expertise, you still have to mesh for these types of products, whereas you don’t for SimSolid. We’ve seen many companies with integrated simulation with CAD move to SimSolid because it really removes barriers between simulation and design.
From a designer’s viewpoint, you keep your existing CAD because SimSolid supports all common CAD file formats. A few domain-based products, in AEC for example, use exotics working with 1D / 2D objects so that’s not for SimSolid. But, if your CAD creates solids, and the majority of mainstream CAD packages do, then that’s fine, you just import it into SimSolid and you’re ready to run your simulation.
We’ve talked about simulation of large assemblies in SimSolid – straight off the CAD, no defeaturing. Being so easy and quick, that opens the door to designers looking at innovative solutions to engineering problems: doing the “what if” studies. You have the freedom to explore multiple concepts and variants easily.
Another important factor is efficient use of resources needed for simulation. On the human resources side, with SimSolid you don’t need specialists in simplifying geometries – because you don’t do that – or meshing – as there isn’t any.
SimSolid is a very small software download package. Its standard install core package is around 50MB, when you add in other items it gets to 320MB of which 100-150MB is Help and Documentation. To have such powerful software in such a small download size, that’s astounding because most other products’ installation packages are over 1GB.
On the hardware side, when you look at simulation of assemblies for conventional analysis we are getting into heavy demands: HPC machines and GPUs. But with SimSolid, you don’t need this sort of hardware investment. Any standard 16GB Windows laptop, that’s all we need to get your results in minutes.
Today, everyone is talking about Cloud and Altair is there, as you’d expect. Our SimSolid Cloud solution is within 70% of the desktop with new features being added fast. Here comes that democratization word again because while the Cloud gives huge accessibility, you pay for resources used; all the time to set-up, create and move data up, down and around. SimSolid excels on the Cloud because it takes orders of magnitude less in resources. We can show live simulations in 1 or 2 minutes, no problem, 1000s of parts, view the results, everything. Nobody has the technology that uses so few resources to simulate complex assemblies like we can. No other companies can do that live.
SimSolid on the Cloud opens the doors to true collaboration and accessibility. It’s a native solution, you can use a tablet or a smartphone to run it. Just open any browser and run your analysis and see your results. That’s a major benefit of Cloud, that’s real democratization and it’s the future.
Is Altair SimSolid only used by large companies? Can SMEs and academic organizations also benefit? Is SimSolid expensive?
In our ever-expanding SimSolid customer portfolio, we have both: very large multinationals that everyone has heard of, but also many, much smaller companies and start-ups located all around the world.
A key value-for-money indicator for companies of all sizes is easy access to the latest versions of software when they need them and only pay for what they use. This is the basis of Altair’s patented value-based licensing system that now, 20 years on, is called Altair Units . Our unified licensing system gives clients access to every Altair product and the power to solve problems on any scale. At various price points, customers maximize their software investment by choosing from a variety of software tools and run it from anywhere. For cloud-based license management, we have Altair OneTM.
And yes, SimSolid is widely used by academia around the world. From the examples of Altair University supporting articles , the bone biomechanics studies by the University of Western Ontario shows SimSolid beyond its more usual industrial applications.
Can you give us some examples from the different industries?
You’ll find many examples on the website, but let’s pick one from a SME.
The first thing to appreciate is that “small company” does not mean simple or small designs. Many do pretty complicated things but that makes conventional FE simulation prohibitive. Even if they had a specialist on-board, none of these people can spend months preparing a model. At best, if it’s needed by regulators then they outsource simulation and that starts getting complicated to project manage and is also expensive.
We have a small company making bespoke chain-driven elevators. We are talking about people who sit down to invent each product and design it. They have to obey all the regulations because we’re talking about peoples’ safety. They don’t have a dedicated person for that. What they do is for each new design, and they have a wide variety, they now use SimSolid upfront, right away.
Their bespoke products comprise columns with chains that lift platforms. They all start with an approximate size. There are strict regulations about how much deflection is allowed on the platform. They investigate column placements before moving onto the smaller things. This is where they have found SimSolid invaluable because they can easily customize, easily play around with ideas, and make that decision within a day.
Here, SimSolid completely displaced their CAD embedded simulation package.
For our larger companies, who may well have a dedicated analyst in the organization, an advantage of using SimSolid is that the designers can effectively nail down a design before needing to pass it over for regulatory validation or conformity, say.
For the consultant structural engineering specialist or analyst, SimSolid can handle a lot of the routine work before going deeper with FEA, if needed.
Looking ahead, how do you see Altair SimSolid helping customers in the “New Normal”?
Some industries put on hold in the dark days of first COVID lockdowns are now playing catch-up. Altair supported our customers to get their design and engineering teams set-up and working remotely pretty much without skipping a beat. While things are now looking up in some places around the world, COVID clearly has not gone away and will be with us for a while. That means the home office and working-remotely could well remain part of the new normal. I’ve mentioned that our cloud-based systems enable people to work together wherever they are in the world to get projects up and running and keep them on track.
If all you remember is these 5 things about SimSolid:
- Simulate assemblies at pace of design change.
- Simulate model 1:1 created in design.
- Don’t be scared of simulation with SimSolid – it’s for anyone anywhere.
- Freedom to explore multiple concepts and variants easily.
- Empowers designers and analysts, and changes the way people work together…teamwork!
Then you are on the way with SimSolid to deliver fast, accurate feedback early in the design process which means you’re equipped to meet new normal challenges and remain technically and cost-effectively ahead of your competitors.
How can companies get in touch with Altair?
To see more about who we are, what we do, and where we are, check out the Altair website. Altair Engineering’s HQ is in Troy, Michigan, USA and has locations in 25 countries. Explore our office locations to contact our global force of 3,000+ engineers, scientists, and creative thinkers who can provide you with innovative solutions.
About Altair SimSolid
By performing structural analyses on fully featured CAD assemblies within minutes, SimSolid is the game-changing simulation technology for designers, engineers, and analysts. It eliminates geometry preparation and meshing: the two most time-consuming, expertise-extensive, and error-prone tasks performed in a conventional structural simulation.
More information about Altair SimSolid can be found on its dedicated product solutions page which also gives some quick links to Reviews and Testimonials and Altair Community to get answers to your questions. Then hit the button to request a free trial to see what SimSolid can do for you.
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