Prodrive, a leading motorsport technology company, faced a significant challenge with its legacy analytics system. The system collected sensor data from its cars, but struggled with large datasets collected over long periods of time. Analyzing engine data over a car’s lifetime was crucial for Prodrive as it could provide valuable insight into design and manufacturing tweaks that could improve vehicle performance. Furthermore, accurately predicting when critical components are likely to fail would help racing teams optimize pit stop timing during races. Given the number of sensors in Prodrive-built cars and their sampling frequencies, the amount of data collected over a car’s lifetime was significant. Each car could produce about half a terabyte of data during an average race weekend and five to ten terabytes of data every week during test runs. Prodrive needed data analytics software that could manage very large volumes of data, provide better management capabilities, and support fast development and implementation cycles.

Ford Motor Company, a global automotive giant, was facing challenges in the realm of Additive Manufacturing (AM), a process that involves adding material layer by layer to manufacture components. This technology, while promising significant benefits such as cost reduction, tooling improvements, and the ability to create complex designs, is relatively new. As a result, the industry's expertise in AM is not on par with traditional manufacturing. Ford found it challenging to set printer parameters correctly, as incorrect settings could lead to structural failures, performance deficiencies, and aesthetic issues in the printed components. The pursuit of mechanical design efficiency often led to overlooking critical considerations.

Elisava Racing Team, a project of final year students at ELISAVA Barcelona School of Design and Engineering, had the challenge of designing and developing an electric motorcycle to compete in the Barcelona Smart Moto Challenge. The team had already optimized important structural parts of their previous designs, “ERAY” and “Dayna,” but wanted to take their latest design “Dayna EVO” a step further. The team aimed to create a 100% electric off-road motorcycle with an IoT connection and a medical service capability. They sought to improve the bike’s safety, comfort, and structural behavior, aiming for a lighter, simpler bike. To achieve this, they needed simulation tools to generate shapes, predict material behavior, and optimize manufacturing processes for the fully electrified motorbike.

PUNCH Torino S.P.A., a company specializing in designing and developing innovative propulsion systems and control solutions, faced a significant challenge after joining the PUNCH Group. The team needed to build a new High-Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructure from scratch to accommodate their users’ technology needs. They decided to avoid the expense and maintenance issues inherent in on-premises computing and instead opted for a complex, multi-vendor cloud architecture. However, setting up such an architecture required an expert partner with a deep understanding of a range of technical knowledge, including high-performance computing (HPC).

TokyoFlash Japan, a leading designer and seller of unique wristwatches, faced the challenge of designing unique and stylish wristwatches that would appeal to their target audience. The company's design philosophy is to create watches that are not only unique but also fashionable. The designers at TokyoFlash believe in working on wild projects and their mantra is 'the crazier, the better'. However, the challenge was to bring these wild and crazy ideas to life and present them to the target audience in a way that they could visualize and appreciate the designs.

XOX Audio Tools, a company that brings high design and advanced technologies to the musical field, was faced with the challenge of creating a completely new electric guitar that not only sounded good but also looked aesthetically pleasing. This was a significant challenge considering the lack of new ideas and features in the musical instrument field. The company wanted to create a unique design that would stand out in the market, while also ensuring that the guitar was functional and performed well. The goal was to find the ideal shape that would meet these requirements.

Pininfarina Extra, a company known for its elegance, essentiality, and innovation in the automotive industry, faced the challenge of extending these values to sectors outside the automotive industry. The company aimed to bring its unique design philosophy to everyday products, focusing on an elegant, essential style that places human needs at the center. The challenge was not only to understand the continuous evolution of modern life but also to interpret different cultures and social paradigms. This required a multicultural and cross-disciplinary team capable of comprehending and adapting to the changing dynamics of the world.

Automotive Lighting, a global leader in exterior automotive lighting, faced a challenge in delivering brand-specific styling and rendering of rear lamps. The rear lamps are not only crucial safety components but also serve as strong brand indicators, incorporating important styling elements that define the appearance and identity of a particular vehicle model. The company needed to ensure these safety and brand elements received precise attention to detail. The complexity of the components, including metallic reflectors, light bulb or LED sources, embossed and transparent elements such as polycarbonate lenses, made the rendering process challenging. Furthermore, the rendering process had to consider the dual usage of automotive lamps, which are switched off during the day and switched on during the night.

Ron Mendell, a renowned concept artist in the Hollywood motion picture industry, faced the challenge of assisting filmmakers in constructing the reality inhabited by their characters. His role was to transport the audience into the characters’ world, a key element of effective storytelling in any motion picture. This task fell under the purview of the Art Department, requiring a significant amount of effort and creativity. Prior to the implementation of a new solution, Mendell's process was manual. He would start with pencil and paper, developing his ideas until a final design was approved. This process involved sketching, using color markers, paint, and other traditional art tools. The final steps included drafting, dimensioning, and sectioning until enough 2D drawings were generated to hand off to a craftsman. This manual process was time-consuming and lacked the flexibility for quick changes.

The Weizmann Institute of Science's Chemistry Faculty faced a significant challenge in managing their high-performance computing (HPC) facility. The HPC cluster, consisting of 1242 cores, served hundreds of faculty members and was in the process of expanding to 3096 cores. The cluster was used for a wide range of research fields, including quantum mechanics, protein folding, DNA recognition, turbulence physics, and climate modeling. The installed software was a mix of advanced C and FORTRAN compilers, mathematical libraries, and a variety of free, academic, commercial, and homegrown dedicated software tools. The workload types varied widely, and different teams had different priorities and needs. The computing environment was a complex system of users, resources, requirements, and policies that needed to be carefully managed. The Institute sought a workload management software vendor that could provide consistently high performance, support for complexity in user priorities and profiles, a proactive, collaborative approach to solution delivery, and reliable user support.

The Deep Orange Program of the Clemson University International Center for Automotive Research (CUICAR) was tasked with designing a six-seat sports car using innovative sheet-folding technology. The goal was to develop a vehicle based on the architecture of a mainstream hybrid concept marketed toward Generation Y. The design had to accommodate four 95th percentile male occupants in the outboard seats and two 50th percentile male occupants on the middle seats using a 2-row, 3+3 seating configuration. The body-in-white (BIW) structural design concept was chosen to explore the Industrial Origami® patented technology that enables the folding of lighter gauge material into complex shapes for the body structural members. The forming is completed with simple, low-cost fixtures, at the assembly location. The challenge was to balance design requirements for BIW stiffness, packaging space, cost, and weight.

The Queensland Institute of Medical Research (QIMR), one of Australia's largest and most successful medical research institutes, faced a significant challenge in providing shared High-Performance Computing (HPC) resources to its hundreds of scientists, students, and support staff. The institute, which is home to over 50 separate laboratories supporting six research departments, needed advanced facilities to support its scientists' cutting-edge projects and attract the best researchers. To meet this need, an HPC cluster was established to be shared as a service among the scientific labs at QIMR. However, managing job scheduling and optimizing throughput on this shared resource was a complex task that required a reliable workload management system.

The Aarhus School of Architecture in Denmark was keen on exploring the potential of applying simulation-based topology optimization, a technique commonly used in the automotive, aeronautical, and naval industries, to architectural concrete structures. The challenge was to combine this with robotic fabrication of polystyrene formwork for concrete casting. The Unikabeton Prototype project was created for this purpose, involving collaboration among the eight largest institutions and corporations in the Danish building industry. However, the use of computerized optimization tools was largely foreign to the field of architecture. There was a reluctance to lose design control to the optimization software, and this conservatism in the architectural industry posed a significant challenge. The Unikabeton project was one of the first academic research projects to address the use of topology optimization in architectural design. The potential payoff was significant, considering that CO2 emissions from the production of concrete account for 5 percent of total global emissions.

The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI), the world’s largest private non-profit biomedical research facility, faced a significant challenge in fulfilling compute cycles for its scientists. The institute's research, which spans across immunology, molecular biology, cell biology, chemistry, neurosciences, autoimmune diseases, cardiovascular disorders, and cancer, is highly compute-intensive. The Research Computing Department at TSRI operates three High-Performance Computing (HPC) platforms to deliver the compute cycles needed by the scientists. However, managing the workload across these platforms and providing a seamless interface for the scientists was a significant challenge. The institute needed a solution that could handle workload management for up to 500 account-holding users, of which 75-100 are most active, without requiring a lot of support.

The aluminum extrusion industry has been facing significant challenges due to the shorter life and frequent failures of dies used in the extrusion of hard alloys. These issues have a direct impact on productivity and increase production costs. The situation is further complicated by the increasing use of aluminum extrusions in various industries such as automotive, aerospace, railway, medical, architectural, and others. These applications have stringent strength and surface quality requirements, often necessitating the use of newer and harder alloys. Traditional die design practices have proven inadequate for these new demands, resulting in dies with shorter lifespans. The Conglin Group, a leader in Chinese aluminum fabrication technology, sought to address these challenges and meet the growing demands from both domestic and international markets.

VTT, a leading research and technology centre in Finland, partnered with Nurmi Cylinders, a Finnish manufacturer of hydraulic cylinder products, to optimise a valve block for demanding industrial applications using Additive Manufacturing (AM). The challenge was to design a valve block that would fully benefit from the AM process, reducing its size and the amount of material needed, and optimising its internal channels to produce a better component for the customer. Traditional manufacturing methods for valve blocks involve forming a block of metal into the desired shape and drilling internal channels to accommodate hydraulic fluid flow. This process is often cumbersome and prone to alignment issues and potential leakage. Furthermore, not every component or product is suitable for AM, depending on its size, form, design, and the quantity needed.

The Tokyo National Museum (TNM), founded in 1872, holds over 113,000 cultural assets including paintings, sculptures, ceramics, and more. These priceless artifacts often need to be transported between locations, making their packaging and transportation a serious business. The TNM discovered an unexpected and unacceptable vibration loading to these precious artifacts during transportation. The museum had little control over the vehicle dynamics of the shipping trucks, making it clear that the packaging system design needed to be re-evaluated. The TNM had been using coil spring type “vibration isolators” for shipments of cultural assets. These isolators were positioned at the bottom of a shipping box, which contained the art objects. However, the results from both a random lab test and a trial truck shipment indicated a resonance frequency between 10 Hz to 20 Hz, which was within the truck’s frequency range of excitation (10 Hz to 20 Hz), leading to potential damage to the artifacts.

Bajaj Auto, the third largest motorcycle manufacturer and the world’s largest producer of three-wheelers, was facing challenges in managing and controlling its enterprise software assets. With software procurement becoming a rising cost of doing business, software inventory management, license utilization rates, and charge-back accounting became critically important for accurate capacity planning and budgeting. Bajaj Auto's senior management was struggling to 'right-size' their product lifecycle management (PLM) software investments against organizational productivity. The company found it difficult to consolidate the total number of licenses and understand the usage of PLM, CAD, CAE, CFD, and NVH software for capacity planning to support its R&D staff. The company also discovered that up to 25% of procured software was significantly underutilized or not utilized at all. The lack of visibility into distributed systems and minimal accounting for procured software assets further complicated the situation.

The engineers at [AB]structures, an Italian structural design and engineering company, were tasked with the challenge of developing three structurally optimized but unique racing yachts within a preset time frame. The yachts were to be used in the 2011 – 2012 edition of the Volvo Ocean Race. The challenge was further complicated by the Volvo Open70 Box Rule, which sets specific parameters for the yachts, such as the keel weight to be between 6.0-7.4 tons and the overall measured weight of the yacht to be no less than 14 tons. Each of the teams required different solutions from [AB]structures, pushing the design envelope and demanding innovative and efficient solutions.

Nippon Sharyo, a leading manufacturer of railroad cars in Japan, faced a complex challenge in enhancing the safety and comfort of their bullet trains. The aerodynamic pressures exerted on the trains, especially when entering and exiting tunnels or passing other trains, posed significant safety risks and discomfort to passengers. The pressure wave created when a train enters a tunnel could cause loud noise and vibration, and the collision of pressure waves when two trains pass each other in a tunnel could produce a force strong enough to push one train away from the other. If not properly managed, these forces could potentially derail the train or at least cause a jarring experience for passengers. Other factors such as unsteady loads when trains pass in open landscapes, the impact of crosswinds, noise from the door frame, and ensuring optimal airflow from heating and air conditioning systems also needed to be considered to maximize passenger safety and comfort.

In a bid to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and contribute to the prevention of global warming, the automobile industry has been working on improving vehicle body structures and engine efficiency. A significant part of this effort is the drive to make vehicle bodies lighter, thereby improving fuel efficiency. While metals like steel and aluminum make up most of a car's weight, there has been a growing trend to replace some of these materials with lighter plastic. However, plastic, which now accounts for about 9% of a car's weight, presents its own challenges. It is significantly lighter than metal and can be molded into complex shapes, but it also deforms easily under external force or high temperatures. Kanto Auto Works, a core member of the Toyota Group, was faced with the challenge of making plastic parts lighter while ensuring they maintained sufficient rigidity and heat resistance.

Mabe, a global company that designs, produces, and distributes appliances to over 70 countries, faced a challenge in improving the protection of its washer-dryer by optimizing packaging material. The company wanted to reduce potential transit damage to its products while avoiding the use of excessive packaging that would lead to significantly higher material and shipping costs. The challenge was to produce an optimized packaging design that took into account a variety of loading scenarios and alternative package designs, and to do so early in the design stage, before any physical testing of the packaging was performed. Mabe also wanted to transfer the analytical simulation techniques developed for the washer-dryer to packaging for other products in the future, allowing the company to optimize and accelerate its design efforts.

Sicma Aero Seat SA, a French manufacturer of airline passenger seats, faced a significant challenge in the design, manufacturing, and maintenance of its products. The company's seats, which range from simple to sophisticated models with complex electrical and electronic features, had to comply with stringent safety regulations. These regulations required the seats to withstand a crash impact 16 times the force of gravity, translating into tougher design and manufacturing constraints. Additionally, the seats had to appeal to passengers and adhere to various certification and safety regulations, including those related to crash impact. The company also had to meet customer specifications and use a combination of virtual and physical testing to meet appropriate regulations. The challenge was to improve their seating products, cut certification costs, and reduce product development and delivery cycles.

Automotive Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) globally are grappling with the challenge of reducing computer aided engineering (CAE) cycle times. This is due to an increasing number of car variants, a surge in data volume, and intense competitive pressure. OPEL, in response to these challenges, identified the design process of engine mount systems as a potential area for process automation. The objective was to enable NVH engineers to generate input decks even without detailed load case information. The knowledge had to be captured and reused in a standardized workflow. Additionally, automatic optimization and robustness analysis of the mount parameters had to be integrated into the process to quickly improve the final product quality.

F.S. Fehrer Automotive GmbH, an international supplier for the automotive industry, was facing challenges in the development of their seating systems. The seat of a vehicle, being the direct and closest connection of the passenger with the automobile, has great demands placed on it. Factors such as ergonomics, vibration damping, durability features, and climatic comfort are important criteria in the development of a molded foam pad for seating. Fehrer was in search of simulation tools that could enhance their development process, deliver accurate and fast results, and provide access to a reliable and fast solver. The tools also needed to be easy to learn and affordable.

ABstructures, a company specializing in innovative design solutions for lightweight structures, was tasked with the challenge of developing a structurally optimized racing yacht within a preset time frame for the Volvo Ocean Race 2009. The challenge was compounded by the strict boundary conditions of the Volvo Open70 Rule, which defined parameters such as the keel weight to be between 6.0-7.4 tons and the overall weight of the yacht to be close to 14 tons. The company needed to design and optimize the carbon structures of the yacht to achieve fundamental structural improvements compared to the older-generation yachts that competed in the 2004 edition of the Volvo Ocean Race.

NASA's Orion Crew Module, designed for long-duration missions into deep space, required a clear understanding of the dynamic loads generated during water impact to maintain the spacecraft’s structural integrity and increase the safety of the crew. The water landing of a craft like the Orion Crew Module is a complex and changeable event, subject to the dynamics of the vehicle’s structure and sub-structures, such as its heat shield, as well as atmospheric and water conditions. Creating a computer simulation of this event is difficult and especially sensitive to such input variables as mesh density, boundary conditions and contact interfaces. To ensure that simulations reflect real-life conditions as accurately as possible, physical test data is needed to correlate to and anchor the finite element (FE) simulation models. The NASA Engineering and Safety Center (NESC) sought to establish a clear understanding of the specific modeling methods needed to perform dynamic simulations of the Orion Crew Module water landings.

Medtronic, a global leader in medical device manufacturing, was facing a significant challenge in the design and validation process of a new medical stent. The stent, an expandable mesh inserted into a patient's artery to keep it open, required meticulous design and rigorous testing. Traditional methods of computer-aided engineering (CAE) and virtual simulation were not fully utilized within the industry due to the slow verification process for often microscopic components. Medtronic was seeking a way to not only improve the design of the stent but also to speed up the validation process, ensuring a faster time-to-market and better performing products.

Esterline Advanced Sensors, a leading provider of aeronautic sensors, faced a significant challenge in the development of their products. Each sensor is a unique project for a specific customer, with individual requirements that often change during the development process. This necessitates multiple iterations on design changes and intensive simulations to ensure the final product meets the customer's needs. The sensors, composed of several sub-parts and different materials, grow into complex models when prepared for simulation. The efficiency and reliability of the simulation heavily depend on the mesh features and quality of these models. The challenge was to quickly incorporate required modifications into the current model, create models from scratch, and quickly adopt modifications for design variants, all while maintaining high quality and reducing calculation time.

Unatec, a company with over a decade of experience in energy solutions consulting, was grappling with the challenge of controlling costs and improving production for energy producers. The company recognized that uncontrolled costs and inaccurate predictions could significantly reduce profits, potentially leading to losses. The energy generation and management sector, if not optimized, can severely impact economic results. Profits can be dramatically diminished and losses can even be incurred if costs are not closely controlled or production is not predicted accurately. Furthermore, many countries have started to dramatically reduce economic subsidies for production and have introduced more regulations. In some cases, it is even mandatory for energy producers to optimize energy management to increase profit and avoid sanctions and penalties.