Jon Gittoes, FE team leader at Atkins, said: “The majority of cost incurred when performing finite element (FE) analysis is during the initial model-generation phase, so reducing the amount of time spent at this stage is extremely valuable to us and our clients. Basically it comes down to minimizing the time it takes to get from initial geometry to a working model, and that’s what HyperMesh does so well. HyperMesh has excellent geometry idealization, which significantly improves our design efficiency and has a large impact on the overall project timescales.”
Atkins’ recent project work includes aircraft heavy landing and bird-strike analysis for Airbus, Rolls-Royce gas turbines development and even the 1000mph BLOODHOUND Supersonic Car project. In addition to HyperMesh and HyperView, Atkins has deployed HyperWorks’ optimization solution, OptiStruct, in the BLOODHOUND SSC project.
Mr. Gittoes added that: “The continuing trend towards composite materials and non-linear analysis is significantly increasing the complexity of analysis pre- and post-processing. Using a common tool to build models for a variety of analysis codes allows our engineers to work on a wide variety of projects. We are using HyperWorks to investigate problems as varied as the design of turbomachinery transmission test rigs, assessing aircraft heavy landings and the concept design of the BLOODHOUND SSC. HyperWorks has the features that we need to develop and manage large models, which is particularly important for our non-linear impact work. Altair’s customer support team have also helped us integrate HyperWorks into our existing design processes and quickly train our engineers.”
