[Hardware] How Simulation Can Accelerate Your Digital Transformation

[Angel of Death]

Around the mahogany tables of corporate boardrooms and the plywood workbenches of garage-based startups, one topic has threatened to monopolize business discussions for years: digital transformation. The first question in those discussions is often some form of “what is digital transformation?” The short answer is “everything.” After all, what company isn’t using digital tools to improve traditional workflows or capitalize on new business models made possible by our ever-evolving digital economy? The slightly longer answer is this: Digital transformation is the use of computers, software, and data to better understand what customers want, and then provide those experiences. It’s as simple—and as complicated—as that. It’s simple because it’s business as usual: Invest in new technologies to build a better product. It’s complicated because business as usual is disrupted across industries by a deluge of valuable data that promises personalized medicine, net-zero carbon emission airlines, autonomous vehicles, smart cities, the industrial internet of things (IIoT), and more—if that data can be effectively applied. Mining, understanding, and applying data to meet evolving customer needs is the most significant digital transformation challenge faced by businesses in every sector. To meet that challenge, businesses are trying to make sense of the information they are collecting to better inform decisions as they compete to get the best products to market faster.Simulation helps businesses meet those goals by enabling them to accurately predict and visualize what will happen in a given environment—in an automobile, an industrial plant, or even a person—under a certain set of circumstances. A first-tier original equipment manufacturer (OEM) supplier for the automotive industry, thyssenkrupp Presta AG, reached a targeted 50% weight-reduction goal. The company achieved this by replacing metal housing for a servo-assisted steering system with an injection-molded housing made of short-fiber reinforced glass-fiber composite. Using simulation solutions gave thyssenkrupp Presta confidence in the plastic housing design before its actual manufacturing. The adoption of an innovative and lightweight plastic housing for its steering system supports both the ecological and the economic goals of the company. Digital twins can be connected to IIoT platforms, enabling remote predictive maintenance of physical equipment to extend digital transformation initiatives to the edge of the enterprise. ENGIE, one of the world’s leading suppliers of energy efficiency services, is helping companies transition to carbon-free energy by employing digital-twin simulation solutions. “This real-time technology allows us to observe and predict the behavior of our installation, and thus test strategies for the operation of the equipment by implementing, testing, and validating different scenarios instantly on the digital twin before deployment on the equipment,” said Nicolas Meynet, multiphysics simulation expert at ENGIE Lab CRIGEN. “The customer can better understand, anticipate, and validate the proper functioning of his [or her] installation by virtually testing the changes on the equipment.”

What if digital-twin functionality extended to people? Lives could be saved, because medicines, surgical procedures, and treatment regimens would all be based on individual characteristics instead of generalities.Every human body is distinct in its geometry, movements, and behaviors. By creating a patient-specific simulation, we can predict how a proposed treatment plan will work not just in a generalized way, but in some cases also for a specific person,” said Dr. Liesbet Geris, research professor in biomechanics and computational tissue engineering at the Université de Liège and Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium. “This is a revolutionary concept that has the potential to fundamentally change the way we treat patients in a medical setting.” Geris is a long-time user of simulation in her research, which focuses on bone and cartilage regeneration, computational tissue engineering, and the design of orthopedic implants that can be 3D printed on demand. Accurate predictions and visualization are powerful forces in digital transformation. Simulation allows companies to see how new data affects a design, even if those changes are invisible to the naked eye, such as thermal flows around a printed circuit board, electromagnetic interference from lightning striking an aircraft, or the sun’s reflection off a LiDAR camera lens that hasn’t yet been built. Those visuals are both invaluable for collaboration and for exploring “what if” scenarios that lead to innovative designs. Simulation Speeds System Design and Development Whether using a new, lighter material to design a more fuel-efficient plane, modeling a battery pack in an autonomous vehicle, or designing an integrated circuit in a cell phone, simulation speeds product design and development by minimizing or avoiding the time and expenses associated with old design-build-test cycles that require multiple physical prototypes. As companies realize the enormous benefits of simulating components, they can apply simulation to the subsystems and systems that comprise those components. However, doing so creates large, complex digital models that could take days to solve on a conventional computer workstation. While that is exponentially better than months of building and testing physical prototypes, it can be even faster; Ansys simulation software can take advantage of high-performance computing (HPC) power and cloud computing to speed simulation times. Ansys Cloud provides access to on-demand, cloud-based computing resources, including interactive workstations and HPC clusters, for faster high-fidelity results offering greater performance insight. Ansys has also developed workflows that use reduced-order model (ROM) techniques to drastically reduce simulation runtimes without sacrificing accuracy. ABB engineers rapidly and accurately analyzed the thermal behavior of electric traction motors along their full duty cycles by coupling Ansys Fluent simulation software with Ansys Twin Builder’s dynamic ROM. The ROM gave the ABB team a way to obtain thermal performance results extraordinarily fast, empowering ABB engineers to examine a motor model, select random operational parameters, and quickly demonstrate the behavior of a traction model in response. With a traditional solver, this process would require many hours or even days. Using a dynamic ROM, engineers accomplished this task in a few milliseconds. Companies from every industry have made simulation a key part of their digital transformation efforts. It enables them to optimize product design and development, ensure system components interact seamlessly, and bring innovations to market faster—all without the expense of building and testing multiple prototypes.