Uwe Schramm, CTO of solvers, optimisation and multi-physics solutions at Altair, told SME Media that the most complex finite element (FE) models can be managed in the new Altair HyperWorks user interface.
« Designers can quickly evaluate manufacturing feasibility of their design and select a cost-effective manufacturing process, » Schramm explained. « Manufacturing engineers can use the software to optimise production. Modern user experiences like Altair Inspire provide easy-to-learn access to manufacturing simulation technology. »
Manufacturing simulation software is therefore increasingly adapted to the needs of designers and manufacturing specialists — rather than catered to suit experts in simulation.
The improvements in user experience (UX) in turn drive take-up of simulations in manufacturing engineering applications, which helps accelerate design and shop-floor decisions.
« Many organisations now use manufacturing simulation to initialise models with more realistic material and other properties that get manipulated during manufacturing. This helps to more accurately predict failure modes in the final product and avoid surprises with the first physical prototype, » Schramm said.
James Scapa, chairman and CEO at Altair, said this year saw the « most significant » software updates so far for Altair, with all software products incorporating advances in UX and new features, including intuitive workflows that speed up product development and therefore time to market.
« It also broadens the scope of the new user experience, enables access to more physics, data analytics, and machine learning, and makes the Altair software delivery method more flexible and accessible, » said Scapa.
Scapa highlighted a new interface to Altair HyperWorks for high-fidelity CAE modelling and visualisation as well as the integration of Altair SimSolid into Altair Inspire, and GPU acceleration in Altair AcuSolve.
Benefits include a tripling – or even quadrupling – of speed, while supporting nucleate boiling, radiation, condensation/evaporation and multi-phase fluid-structure interaction.
Schramm said that compute-on-demand via the cloud has been key in helping clients explore ideas quickly and avoid opportunity cost in today’s increasingly dynamic workloads.
« Resources can be spun up in the cloud to make discoveries in days that might have come months later if they had to wait on building out infrastructure, » he says.
Although integration expertise and cost still needed consideration with cloud, Altair also offers help from a technical and professional services perspective that has become an increasingly important part of Altair’s offering, Schramm said.
Altair Engineering signed a new distribution agreement with QBS in July. Read the full announcement.
QBS will sell Altair’s portfolio of data analytics solutions, specifically Monarch and Knowledge Studio – Altair’s data preparation and data science/machine learning solutions.
Andrew Baldwin, sales director for EMEA data analytics at Altair, said: « We had been looking for a focused distribution partner with expertise in the SaaS industry. QBS ticked every box and we are pleased to now have them as our dedicated distributor in the UK and across Ireland. »