Renault Nissan Mitsubishi Alliance Accelerates Chassis Development with Altair SimSolid

• Analytics & Modeling - Digital Twin / Simulation

• Automotive
• Equipment & Machinery

• Product Research & Development
• Quality Assurance

• Manufacturing Process Simulation
• Time Sensitive Networking

Renault Nissan Mitsubishi Alliance, a strategic partnership between Renault, Nissan, and Mitsubishi Motors, was facing a significant challenge in reducing the weight of their vehicles to stay competitive in the automotive industry. The company aimed to decrease the mass on chassis components by combining new, lighter material Alu with topology optimization. However, the traditional simulation methods such as finite element analysis, while helpful in developing lighter and affordable cars, were time-consuming. The company needed a new, easy-to-use simulation tool that would enable non-experts, part-time analysts, and designers to gain insights and accurate results in the early design phases of Renault vehicles chassis projects and projects for production line tooling/conveyors. The challenge was to find a solution that could reduce the lead time on the development of its products, aligning with the corporate initiative “FAST” (Future-Ready At-Scale Transformation).

Renault Nissan Mitsubishi Alliance is a strategic partnership between the automobile manufacturers Renault, Nissan, and Mitsubishi Motors. The alliance has 122 manufacturing plants worldwide with nearly 450,000 employees controlling ten major brands: Renault, Nissan, Mitsubishi, Infiniti, Renault Samsung, Dacia, Alpine, Datsun, Venucia, and Lada. The ambition of the alliance is to offer autonomous drive, connectivity features, and services on a wide range of affordable vehicles. The Renault Chassis Le Mans plant, which is building car-to-ground connecting components for the Renault Group and for the Alliance, houses the CTC Chassis Technical Center, a CAD engineering center where 350 engineers and technicians focus on testing and validation.

The Renault Chassis department, which had been working with Altair’s solutions since 2010, decided to use Altair SimSolid. This solution does not require any expertise in analysis, allowing users to work with the raw CAD data and perform structural analyses on fully featured CAD assemblies within minutes. It eliminates the time-consuming, expertise-extensive, and error-prone tasks of geometry preparation and meshing performed in a conventional structural simulation. The CTC team started an evaluation project for the Chassis activities to find out how this simulation tool for structural analysis could be implemented in the Renault design process. The goal was to provide their designers with a software tool which enables them to design quickly in total autonomy based on their calculations results.

• The implementation of Altair SimSolid resulted in significant operational benefits for the Renault Nissan Mitsubishi Alliance. The CTC team was very satisfied with the accuracy level of the software and the lead time reduction compared to the finite element method. The solution provided an easy-to-use, autonomous design loop for part-time analysts and designers, reducing paperwork and meetings. The Chassis development department in Le Mans found the tool to be highly effective in providing accurate results while also offering non-simulation experts access to simulation and optimization. One of the main benefits was the time saving the new solution offered, reducing the overall lead time by several weeks, which also translated to cost savings for the overall development process. The Chassis team was very satisfied with the customer partnership and specific customization Altair was offering.

• Accurate results with only 5-10% error rate
• Lead time reduction by 25 to 100 times
• Significant reduction in lead time from weeks to hours