Stanley Black & Decker (SBD), a global provider of hand tools, power tools, and related accessories, was seeking ways to maintain a competitive edge and bring better-performing products to market faster. The company was particularly interested in optimizing the hammer mechanism design for their top-selling rotary hammers and knew they needed a computer-aided engineering (CAE)-based approach. However, the CAE-based optimization they had been using had a runtime of about three weeks, which was not sufficient to stay competitive. SBD aimed to reduce this runtime to one weekend. The team realized they needed more computational power to drive desired performance improvements, but they were concerned about the cost of high-performance computing (HPC) hardware/cores, the effort to maintain and support a complex HPC system, and the ability to fully leverage this hardware with the necessary software licenses to keep utilization high.

DSM Engineering Plastics, a global provider of high-performance plastics, faced a challenge in the LED lighting applications sector. The heat sinks used in these applications, primarily made of aluminum, were responsible for dissipating heat generated by LEDs to the environment. However, aluminum, despite being a good heat conductor, had limitations such as high costs related to machining die-cast parts, limited design freedom, recyclability issues, and weight. DSM sought to provide a plastic-based solution for heat sinks to overcome these issues. To find an optimal design for the heat sink made of polymer material and predict its thermal performance, DSM needed to model natural convection and radiation cooling, the mechanisms by which LED heat sinks dissipate heat to the environment. The challenge was to find a tool that could accurately simulate these processes and provide reliable results.

Airbus, one of the largest aircraft manufacturers, has always been keen on weight saving as it directly impacts fuel consumption, cost, and carbon emissions. To further explore advanced manufacturing technologies, Airbus set up APWorks in 2013, a subsidiary dedicated to design, materials, and 3D printing. However, due to the confidential nature of customer projects, APWorks found it challenging to tangibly showcase the possibilities of parts designed specifically for Additive Layer Manufacturing (ALM). They needed a project that would allow them to demonstrate the potential of ALM, and decided on creating an electric motorcycle. The challenge was to design and produce a motorcycle that was significantly lighter than traditional models, while maintaining strength and durability.

Germany's largest independent engineering partner to the global automotive industry, EDAG, was seeking innovative processes to streamline vehicle development, particularly in the area of lightweight design for both passenger and commercial vehicles. The automotive industry is faced with the challenge of increasing fuel efficiency and meeting legal requirements on emissions, while ensuring safety and competitive pricing. Traditional methods of manufacturing often require design proposals to be adapted to manufacturing constraints, which can limit the potential for lightweight design. In a recent project, EDAG engineers were tasked with developing and manufacturing affordable lightweight constructions of a commercial vehicle that could meet individual customer specifications without major changes in production facilities. This required a process that not only offered the best design approach but also incorporated the requirements of the selected manufacturing method.

Robot Bike Company (RBC), a UK-based startup, was established by aerospace engineers and mountain biking enthusiasts. They aimed to combine additive manufacturing technologies with carbon fiber to create the best bike frames possible. The challenge was to deliver a customizable, lightweight, high strength bike frame made from carbon fiber, a common material in the industry. The carbon fiber tubes and other components were to be joined by additively manufactured titanium 'nodes', customized to individual riders' specifications. Altair ProductDesign’s engineering team was tasked with optimizing these joints, including the head tube, seat post, and chain stay lugs, to ensure they were lightweight, durable, and suitable for the additive manufacturing process.

The challenge faced by DECKED, a company founded by entrepreneurs Lance Meller and Jake Peters, was to create an innovative, robust, and useful storage solution for pickup trucks. The storage system needed to be able to withstand a load of 2,000 lbs, fit into a wide range of pickup models including those from Ford, GM, Chrysler, Toyota, and Nissan, and be manufactured for a compelling retail target price. The main issue was that the large capacity of a pickup truck often came at the expense of storage. The loading area was typically a simple box with no ability to store smaller items safely or secure them from theft. This presented an opportunity in the marketplace for a well-built alternative.

The Laser Zentrum Nord (LZN) and the Technical University Hamburg-Harburg (TUHH) were seeking ways to improve the design and optimization methods for components made with laser additive manufacturing methods. The challenge was to develop structures that are strong yet light, similar to naturally occurring biological structures like bones. The research project, TiLight, aimed to combine innovative design methods with new manufacturing capabilities to economically manufacture lightweight components from the material TiAl6V4, a high-strength titanium alloy. The aerospace industry was the primary focus of the project, where lighter components could lead to higher load capacity or range for aircraft. A standard retaining element in aircraft, a bracket, was selected as a test object for the project.

M.TEC Engineering, a Germany-based engineering service provider, was facing the challenge of meeting growing customer demands for specialized development services across various sectors. As a company that offers a wide range of services including industrial design, mechanical design, material selection, calculation simulation, prototype development, testing, industrialization, tooling, and quality assurance, M.TEC needed flexible access to a variety of software tools. The company was also experiencing constant growth and was striving to become one of Germany's leading service providers for plastics and composite technologies. A specific use case highlighted was the optimization and redesign of a faulty expansion oil tank, which required a comprehensive re-simulation and re-design of the entire oil tank model.

SOGECLAIR aerospace, a major partner in engineering and prime contractor for the aerospace industry, was tasked with the development of a new flooring concept for aircraft cabins. The challenge was to create a lighter structure, adjustable panels for all types of aircraft, and ensure easier installation and maintenance. The aerospace industry has always been at the forefront of weight optimization and lightweight design, hence it was not surprising that aerospace also was one of the first industries to use alternative materials such as composites. The engineers had to consider conflicting issues such as weight, design, maximal dimensions, strength, stiffness etc. The use of optimization technology is the solution to combine all of these constrains with respect to an optimal composite layout. In this context SOGECLAIR aerospace investigates innovative materials and processes to integrate them in the design, analysis, and optimization.

The smartphone industry is one of the fastest evolving and most competitive sectors in the electronics industry. New models are developed every few months, and any reduction in time to market can significantly impact a manufacturer's profitability, positioning, and reputation. However, certain aspects of the development process, such as drop-test simulation, have remained time-consuming and resistant to acceleration. Drop-test simulation is a crucial element in ensuring the quality and robustness of a smartphone. Despite using computer simulation for virtual drop testing, LG Electronics (LGE) faced challenges in shortening the simulation time due to the large number of parts and assemblies in smartphones, the time-consuming geometry cleanup, simplification, and meshing, and the multitude of contact definitions that required many manual steps. Thorough testing involves a variety of drop and bending conditions, where analysis setup is time-intensive. Post-processing and generating reports also contributed to the overall time to achieve results. On average, drop-test simulation took one to two weeks to set up, conduct, and analyze, with modeling and post-processing representing 60 to 80 percent of the time invested.

Renault, one of Europe's largest automotive manufacturers, was faced with the challenge of developing a new, efficient, and lightweight vehicle powertrain. The company aimed to further decrease the weight and increase the performance of existing and in-development engines by redesigning key components to use a minimum amount of material. The challenge was compounded by the need to meet tighter regulations across Europe, US, and Asia, and a shift in consumer demand for more fuel-efficient vehicles. The company also wanted to use design optimization techniques from the start of the development process, rather than as a tactical tool to combat weight problems in the detailed design phase. However, the complexity and time-consuming nature of creating powertrain models posed a potential barrier to this approach.

Scuola Normale Superiore (SNS), a public institution of university education at the forefront of global research, has a mission to convert IT innovation into opportunities in computational science. The SNS Faculty of Science hosts several internationally recognized research groups in Biology, Chemistry, Physics and Mathematics, which are involved in theoretical and applied research in nearly every scientific field. To support state-of-the-art research investigations with a strong theoretical/computational background, SNS established DREAMSLab, a center dedicated to high-performance computing (HPC) and cutting-edge visualization and virtual reality techniques. The core of the DreamsHPC computational facility is a Dell cluster with over 2600 cores monitored in real time. However, given the complexity of the simulations running on the DreamsHPC cluster, it was necessary to carefully plan the software layer to be deployed on the infrastructure. The key requirements were overall ease of management of the already-present heterogeneous hardware, as well as significant simplification for the addition of new computing nodes in the existing structure and the distribution of computational programs on the nodes.

Panasonic Ecology Systems Co., Ltd. was faced with the challenge of making product drop tests more reliable. The company, which plays a key role in the sales of Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) products and solutions globally, understood the importance of evaluating designs through drop-testing before completion to reduce losses. However, the traditional methods of drop-testing were not providing the desired level of reliability. The company was already using RADIOSS, a leading structural analysis solver for highly non-linear problems under dynamic loadings such as impact analysis, as part of their computer-aided engineering tools. The challenge was to make effective use of these resources without the need for new investment, and apply this analysis to product development in other product fields.

Toyota Motorsport GmbH (TMG) utilizes a variety of development software across its departments, including CAE, CAD, and others. These software tools are essential for the engineers' daily work and are retrieved from a large software license pool within the company. However, managing this process efficiently became a challenge for the TMG IT department. They needed a system to monitor software license usage to understand when and how often each license was used. This information was crucial for the management team to understand the actual demand for software within the company, identify areas where licenses were needed, and determine if the company owned more licenses of a certain software type than actually required.

The National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) in Australia operates Raijin, the largest supercomputer in the Southern Hemisphere. The supercomputer handles a wide spectrum of job types, varying in scale and completion time. The challenge was to ensure overall system balance, scalable performance, and a high-quality user experience. The architecture and subsystems needed to scale as the software and hardware scale out, to protect application performance. NCI needed a highly scalable, flexible, and reliable product that could handle both the size and complexity of its computing requirements. NCI previously operated an in-house OpenPBS system with a locally customized scheduler and associated accounting system to manage its resources. However, maintaining the development and support for this system was becoming increasingly difficult, leading NCI to investigate new options for Raijin’s workload manager.

American Railcar Industries, a leading manufacturer of commercial railroad cars, was facing a significant challenge in modifying railcar designs. The company had to design state-of-the-art cars while considering the specific materials to be transported. For instance, designing a car to transport chlorine, a highly corrosive substance, required a robust design that complied with federal and state regulations. The company also had to ensure that the railcar was cost-competitive, which meant developing the least costly design that provided high levels of efficiency. The company had been using finite element analysis software for many years, but the limitations of that software had begun to slow their innovation processes. The company maintains base models for various types of cars, but each customer requires modifications to tailor the cars for the specific cargos they will carry. As a result, engineers had to re-run the model for different load cases. The company was also projecting an increase in projects involving structural dynamics, which were previously contracted out due to the lack of appropriate software.

Unilever's Global Packaging Design Group was faced with the challenge of identifying potential packaging issues early in the design process. The discovery of problems after manufacturing had begun could lead to costly impacts, sometimes necessitating modifications in the tools used during production. This made the design process time-consuming as designers had to consider a wide range of possible issues. The group used simulation to validate potential designs and ensure they could be produced. However, outsourcing the simulation work was considered, which would require an average of two months to develop and carry out the appropriate testing.

The National Supercomputing Center IT4Innovations, a research institute at the VŠB - Technical University of Ostrava (VŠBTUO) in the Czech Republic, was faced with the challenge of supporting the needs of a massive supercomputing system with a large, diverse user base. The supercomputer, being built in two parts, was expected to be one of the 100 most powerful supercomputers in the world upon completion in 2015. The Center had six research directions dealing with a wide variety of computational problems, including real-time traffic analysis/management, flood modeling/predictions, air pollution modeling/preventions, molecular dynamics simulations, and modeling of new materials. Given the wide variety of users and applications, IT4I realized they needed a reliable, high-performing workload management product for the Supercomputing Center’s users. The procurement procedure demanded an advanced job scheduler and resource manager along with advanced tools for utilization analysis.

Polaris, a renowned manufacturer of snowmobiles, was faced with the challenge of reducing iterations while optimizing designs for their snowmobile structures. The Snowmobile Chassis Structures Group, responsible for design and testing, supports three different platform teams with chassis solutions for each set of requirements. The team relied heavily on computer-based design and finite element (FE) analysis in their development process. However, the existing tools were not efficient enough to meet their optimization goals. The team needed a solution that would not only help them achieve their weight reduction goals without compromising on performance but also reduce the time and effort required to complete the optimization of new snowmobile structure designs.

Evenflo, a global leader in the development of innovative infant equipment, was faced with the challenge of making child safety simple with innovative and easy-to-use products. The company aimed to achieve this through a combination of engineering and industrial design. The key consideration in the design process was safety, but ease of use and cost control were also important factors. The immediate challenge was to redesign a car seat release handle, a crucial part that secures the seat shell to a seat base or a stroller. The goal of the redesign was to improve the styling and maintain the ease of use while maintaining or reducing the cost relative to the current part.

Suzhou Samsung Electronics Co., a Korean-Chinese joint venture that develops and produces major home appliances, was facing a challenge with its refrigerator door covers. The company was considering changing the composition of its refrigerator door covers for certain models to reduce costs. Traditionally, ABS engineering plastic was used to create the upper and lower door covers. However, for cost control, the company sought to use high-impact polystyrene, or HIPS, instead of ABS for the injection-molded covers. Unfortunately, during physical reliability testing, the HIPS covers cracked during the temperature cycling process. The cracking was observed in the middle of the door cover’s top surface, beginning at the front edge of the door cover. The engineers at Suzhou Samsung performed an analysis of the material, structure, and injection-molding process to identify the cause of the cracking. They found that the change in material was one factor contributing to the cracking issue.

Lenovo, a leading multinational technology company, was facing intense competition in the computer industry, which necessitated continuous cost reduction, improved product quality and reliability, and shortened product development cycles. The traditional product development methodology was no longer efficient for rapid time to market. Lenovo sought to use computer-aided engineering (CAE) tools for optimizing performance in the initial product design phase to simulate and evaluate its products’ mechanical behavior under loads like impact and vibration. However, engineers were spending 80 percent of their time on pre-processing tasks in the simulation process. The pre-processing tools provided by some CAE software offerings were not strong enough to meet the manufacturer’s requirements, and the quality of the pre-processing mesh was not dependable. Lenovo needed a powerful pre-processing tool that would meet the demands of scientific research and engineering innovation.

Suzhou Samsung Electronics Co., a joint venture between Korean and Chinese companies, has been focusing on optimizing the design of a belt pulley for one of its washing machines. The belt pulley, an essential component of a drum washing machine, was traditionally constructed from cast aluminum. However, with increasing cost pressures, the company sought to reduce the pulley’s weight by optimizing its design and/or using new materials for its production. The challenge was to consider alternative materials, taking into account both their performance and cost. To meet these challenges, Suzhou Samsung decided to employ topology optimization.

Clemson University's IT department, Clemson Computing and Information Technology (CCIT), was facing a significant challenge in managing the workload of their rapidly growing user base. The department utilized the Palmetto cluster, a 17,032-core, 262 TFlop HPC system, as the university's primary HPC resource. This system was heavily used by the university's faculty, staff, students, and 144 external users, including researchers and faculty from other universities. The cluster operated on a 'condo model', where users could purchase nodes for their own priority usage. However, the open-source Maui scheduler previously used by CCIT was unable to handle the scalability and reliability needs of their expanding user base. The system frequently crashed and some advanced features did not function properly, leading to unreliability with the scheduler.

BASF Engineering Plastics, a division of the world's leading chemical company, BASF, is tasked with providing superior engineering design, simulation, and testing support during all phases of the development cycle. The group's primary goal is to provide superior engineering design, simulation, and testing support during all phases of the development cycle. However, the support of various customers in the application of modern materials often demands new concepts that make the advantages of the material applicable. This challenge is further compounded by the need to continually develop modern virtual methods to meet the needs of its customers, as the company believes that mathematical part optimization will broadly gain acceptance as the method of choice in the next few years.

Dana Holding Corporation, a global leader in driveline, sealing, and thermal management technologies, faced a significant challenge in their product development process. The traditional method of transforming CAD designs into prototypes, analyzing the prototype for failure points, redesigning the prototype, and retesting until the product met specifications was proving to be time-consuming and costly. Particularly, the pre-processing for models of cylinder heads and engine blocks required the geometry to be imported from CAD and then cleaned up by engineers, a task that could take anywhere from one to four days. To speed up the design cycle, Dana decided to implement a 'first-time-right' design methodology, where analysis would be conducted before building a prototype. This new process demanded a faster way to pre-process simulation models.

Korg Italy, a subsidiary of the Japanese Korg corporation, specializes in the design and production of high-end digital pianos and electronic keyboards. The company faced a significant challenge in creating these sophisticated musical instruments that required accommodating intricate circuits and mechanisms while maintaining style and elegance. The design process often involved modifications to the internal component design during the product development process. These changes were often necessitated when engineers discovered that an electrical component was of a different size than initially envisaged. Making such alterations at an advanced stage in the product development cycle could lead to considerable costs. Furthermore, the company also had to manage the design of the packaging and cases for these instruments.

Bros Manifatture, a leading maker of handcrafted watch straps and high-quality products since the late 1970s, faced a significant challenge in reducing the time-to-market for over 200 new products created each year. The company, which expanded into the production of steel fashion jewelry and watches, needed to offer flexibility and accuracy to its designers. The market of fashion watches and jewelry demands the introduction of new models each year, necessitating a continual search for fresh and novel ideas. The company's rapid growth, from 18 to 24 million euros in 2007, led to the creation of a Styling Centre to foster new talents internally. However, with dozens of new jewelry and watch models launched each year, it was crucial that the software tools adopted not only expedite the time-to-market of products but also stimulate and liberate the creativity of the designers.

Novellini, a leading European company in the bathroom products industry, faced the challenge of quickly developing and upgrading a wide range of medium and high-end bathroom products. The company, which started as a small artisanal company in the 1970s, has grown and expanded its product range to include shower enclosures, mosquito screens, whirlpools, complete enclosures, equipped shower panels, shower pans, and towel radiators. With an annual production of more than 1.3 million units, Novellini needed to continuously upgrade its product lines, which are distinguished by superior construction quality and design. The company also faced the challenge of meeting commercial needs that often come with extremely fast timelines. Furthermore, Novellini needed to develop assembly instructions for the various product lines.

The Oil and Gas sector is a complex industry that requires intricate and efficient design processes. Traditional CAD design methods often result in heavy, costly, and time-consuming conceptual designs. The industry is constantly seeking ways to reduce material costs, save weight, and expedite the conceptual design process. Furthermore, there is a need to understand different manufacturing techniques better and gain a more comprehensive understanding of the part/assembly. The challenge lies in finding a solution that can address these issues while being easy to use and compatible with existing CAD systems.