TROY — Hundreds of engineers and researchers will examine new techniques for simulating vehicle design with composites and optimizing designs for additive manufacturing, lightweight vehicles and aircraft as they participate in the 2015 Americas Altair Technology Conference, at the Ford Conference and Event Center in Dearborn May 5-7.
Free online registration is available at www.altairatc.com/registernow to engineering professionals in product design, advanced manufacturing, applied physics and high-performance computing who use the engineering software developed by Troy-based Altair.
A wide-ranging series of research papers will be presented at the conference. They include:
* “Structural Component Design Optimization for Additive Manufacture.” Robert M. Taylor, Professor in Practice at the University of Texas at Arlington and Consulting Engineer at Optimal Structures LLC Robert M. Taylor will demonstrate how additive manufacturing removes many of the constraints on product design, enabling all types of products to be much more efficiently produced and as much as 30 percent lighter. He will explain how the advanced capabilities of Altair HyperWorks tools for designing structural topologies to minimize weight while maximizing performance.
* “Cutting-Edge Optimization Methods for the Aerospace Industry.” David Bowen, Structural Analysis Engineer at Boeing Co. will describe how the new MultiModel Optimization capabilities in Altair’s OptiStruct software can overcome the problems associated with attempting to optimize structures and components across multiple configurations. The result is a common component optimization process.
* “Forming Simulation of Woven Composite Fibers and Its Influence on Crash Performance.” Subir Roy, Senior Director of Industry Solutions at Altair, will show how simulation of composite plies made from woven fibers can be carried out with Altair’s RADIOSS solver, mapping the variance in fiber angles and translating those differences into crash-performance results.
* “Pedestrian-Impact Simulation Process with HyperWorks.” Ford Motor Co. Crash Safety Engineer Youn Park will discuss how the HyperWorks software suite can be applied to carry out multiple analyses with a large number of target points for pedestrian impact safety, providing a much more efficient approach to the concern than manual or semi-automatic methods.
Breakout sessions will also delve into such issues as lead-time reduction, process automation, performance optimization and lightweight design. There will also be keynote speeches from Mike Whitens, Director, Vehicle and Enterprise Science, Research, Ford Motor Co., and Kevin Kerrigan, Senior Vice President, Automotive Office, Michigan Economic Development Corp.
Other speakers will include Franck Mouriaux, General Manager, Structures, RUAG Space; Ken Dudley, Senior Researcher, NASA Langley Research Center; Stewart (Denny) Moore, Principal Engineer, Applied Mechanics, General Dynamics/Electric Boat; and Altair Chairman and CEO, James R. Scapa.
“Discussion emerging from the great span of topics offered at the ATC makes this premier conference exceptionally valuable to designers and engineers,” Scapa said. “The conference provides solutions for those who are attempting to manage innovation challenges in the fields of transportation, aerospace, architecture, electronics, scientific research and many other fields where simulation-driven design, data analysis and optimization are critical. Our goal for the ATC conference series is to support the professional engineering community discover news ways to overcome conventional barriers to design and manufacturing leveraging simulation to create stronger and lighter products that can be manufactured in new ways.”