Manufacturing

Manufacturability

Altair offers a unique set of simulation tools to evaluate product feasibility, optimize the manufacturing process, and run virtual try-outs for many traditional, subtractive, and additive manufacturing processes. Users can validate designs early in the manufacturing process with the simplicity and affordability of the simulation software, as well as use optimization technology with specific manufacturing constraints to design better, more efficient products.

Altair’s applications for product manufacturability covers applications in several industries, including automotive, aerospace, electronics, pharmaceutical, and heavy industry.

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Injection Molding EGuide

Design for Manufacturing

Although the overall injection molding process appears straight forward, the interrelationship between the numerous variables at each step is complex.

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3D Printing

3D Printing

Altair® Inspire™ Print3D enables teams to cut product development and additive manufacturing costs by reducing material usage, print times, and post-processing. It provides a fast and accurate toolset for the design and process simulation of selective laser melting (SLM) parts. By capturing behavior independent of the printer type, designers can evaluate and easily modify critical process variables. Further manufacturing process analyses can be performed leveraging third-party tools available through the Altair Partner Alliance (APA).

Injection Molding

Injection Molding

Altair® Inspire™ Mold is a modern, integrated software to streamline design for manufacturing (DfM) of injection molded components. Fast, accurate simulations answer the question "will it fill?" for even large, complex parts in under an hour. Identify potential manufacturing defects early in the development process and make better, more informed design decisions. Leap from manufacturing "know how" to "know why," deliver superior products, reduce scrap, and slash tooling rework costs. For more advanced analyses Altair® SimLab™ offers a seamless, end-to-end simulation workflow from feasibility to performance validation.

Casting

Casting

Altair’s offering includes a fast casting process simulation software that allows the user to enhance and optimize their manufactured components in order to avoid typical casting defects. Altair® Inspire™ Cast is a simulation environment focused on creating high-quality components with increased profitability through a highly intuitive user experience catering to beginners and experts alike. Additional casting simulations products are accessible through the APA.

Metal Forming

Metal Forming

Altair® Inspire™ Form is a sheet metal forming simulation software that enables users to optimize their products for manufacturing, with the consideration of early formability, material utilization, and cost. Cold and hot sheet metal forming, tube bending, hydroforming, and composite forming are supported. Run early manufacturing feasibility analysis within seconds or perform advanced process validation, optimization, and virtual try-outs leveraging an accurate, highly-scalable solution.

Extrusion

Extrusion

Every extrusion company is looking to eliminate costly prototypes and reduce redesign cycles. With Altair, advanced physics simulations are now accessible to organizations of all sizes. Altair® Inspire™ Extrude is a simulation solution for both metal and polymer extrusion. It helps achieve productivity gains by reducing product development costs and improving extrusion quality, increasing production yield. Lower scrap rates can be achieved by exploring process improvements on a virtual press.

Process Manufacturing

Process Manufacturing

Altair® EDEM™ software is used by top-tier process manufacturing companies worldwide in the pharmaceutical, chemical, consumer packaged goods, and asphalt industries to optimize the performance of equipment handling and processing bulk solids. EDEM enables companies to accurately simulate and analyze the behavior of particles, from powders to tablets, providing key information on processes otherwise difficult or sometimes impossible to measure.

Polyurethane Foaming

Polyurethane Foaming

Rigid and flexible polyurethane foams, also known as cellular or expanded polymers, surround us. Their important attributes like lightweight, adaptable strength per unit weight, and insulation characteristics, as well as their inherently high sustainability make them attractive for an increasingly wide range of industrial and household applications.

Altair® Inspire™ PolyFoam provides a modern integrated approach to streamline DfM of flexible molded foam components and rigid foam panels.

Circuit Boards and Electronics

Circuit Boards and Electronics

Run DfM checks early in the development cycle with Altair® Pollex™. Increase efficiency of printed circuit board (PCB) fabrication, assembly, and end-of-line testing, with the export of fabricating, mounting, paneling, and testing data to production line machinery.

PollEx is not just a PCB verification tool, it is solution that accelerates the development of today’s smart, connected, and tightly packaged electronic products.

 
Composites

Composites

Composite material behavior is defined as components are manufactured. Develop and simulate multiscale heterogeneous material models with Altair® Multiscale Designer™, while assuring manufacturability with draping and forming simulation for sandwich and multilayered laminates combining Altair and APA third-party products.

For engineered plastics, SimLab includes a very accurate simulation of fiber orientation during filling and analysis of the structural performance of the complete assembly.

Altair® Material Data Center™, a high-fidelity material database for simulation

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Altair Partner Alliance (APA) Solutions for Manufacturing

Further enhance your manufacturing with partner products from the APA. APA manufacturing solutions feature integration with Altair workflows to help improve the product development lifecycle.

  • For metal additive manufacturing, Amphyon by Additive Works is a powerful tool for simulation-based job preparation that enhances part accuracy and minimizes failure rates.
  • Complement Altair’s topology optimization with Materialise’s 3-matic software that works on an STL level to allow users to modify designs, remesh, create 3D textures, and more.
  • AFDEX by MFRC is the ideal tool to meet your metal casting simulation needs and better predict metal forming loads.

These tools and more available are available through your Altair Units license.

More APA Solutions

Featured Resources

Mass Optimization of a 3D Printed, Small Series Prototype e-Drive Housing at Porsche

In his presentation, Sebastian Wachter of Porsche takes us through an exciting project where topology optimisation technologies were combined with 3D printing to create a highly innovative engine-gearbox housing that is 10% lighter than the existing component and twice as stiff.

Conference Presentations

Alstom

Alstom coupled topology optimization with additive manufacturing to explore the feasibility of alternate manufacturing to traditional casting. This resulted in a 70% weight reduction of its locomotive component.

Customer Stories

Ford Enhances Manufacturing Efficiency

Sheet metal stamping is fundamental to the automotive manufacturing industry. A vast array of different tool, die, and process combinations are employed to create an equally diverse array of components. Traditionally, identifying the optimum approach for each part has been a labor intensive and time-consuming task that requires engineering teams with high levels of skill and experience. This case study demonstrates how Altair Knowledge Studio, a general-purpose data analytics tool, can enable engineering managers and data analysts to deliver clear and quantifiable benefits in the manufacturing domain. For Ford, this is reflected in dramatic improvements in the speed and efficiency with which the best possible sheet metal stamping processes were selected.

Customer Stories

Build Industry-Shaking Smart Product Ecosystems with Less Risk

Experience how Altair® SmartWorks™ gives you everything you need to quickly build scalable, secure web, mobile, and edge applications and then iterate fast to find product-market fit. This presentation, by Pérez Bello, Altair's Product Manager for SmartWorks originally aired at Future.AI in June 2021, and is a little over 11 minutes long.

Future.AI 2021
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