“An automotive OEM would probably have 5,000 CPUs today”

Dr Royston Jones, Executive VP, European Operations & Global CTO, Altair ProductDesign, and Panduranga Rao Chirala, VP, Altair ProductDesign India, talked to Prashant L Rao about trends in the product development space

What’s Altair ProductDesign’s focus area and where does it place in Altair’s overall scheme of things?
Dr. Royston Jones: Altair Product Design is a business unit within Altair. It is a quarter of the revenue, which works out to about $50 mn. We have about 500 engineers, of whom close to 150 are in Bangalore. Our focus is on simulation driven design.

Has the availability of cheap compute cycles helped enrich your software?
Jones: There is indeed a connection between our optimization software and the availability of inexpensive computing. If you look at an automotive OEM, it would probably have around 5,000 CPUs today whereas historically these companies had a tenth of that. For a crash job, a decade ago, you would be solving it on two CPUs. Nowadays, you are solving it on 96 CPUs. This changes the kind of calculation that you can do and it facilitates simulation driven design.

What are the trends that you see in product design and development?
Jones: In 2009 we went through a fuel crisis in Europe and then a financial crisis. Many companies want to product green products with outstanding performance characteristics at a minimum mass. We see an explosion in the requirements to produce these highly engineered structures. We are creating optimization centers within the OEMs. For an aero- or auto-OEM, these centers are ideal for the application of this technology and for ensuring that you can cascade the technology into the established design process.

If we have the luxury of being involved in the concept space, we have concept optimization, where there’s non-designable space and designable space. The software will work out the optimal structural configuration.

Once the design is done, does your software hand it over to some other application?
Jones: At some point we hand over the geometry to CAD or receive it depending on the stage that you are at. What’s powerful about it is that instead of a designer driving the geometry, we are there with our structural simulations defining what that optimal geometry should be.

If you look at the automotive companies, their focus is on performance. With optimization technology, the way that you configure the problem is that performance and mass are in the same setup, so that you are getting the maximum performance for the least amount of mass.

Panduranga Rao: The key differentiation that we bring is analysis driven design. At the conceptual stage, we can take care of topology optimization. Then comes the domain, engineering know-how and the process. We give the customer an optimal manufacturable design. Typically, most companies’ had CAE but did analysis in parallel to the detailed design. By the time that was done, tooling had kicked off. Now we have pulled it upstream. While the design is getting into the subsequent process of detailing, which is a lower stream of PLM, we are addressing the opportunities there. Before you kick off tooling, you have a much better idea of what the likely problems are going to be.

How sophisticated are these simulations? Do you need physical prototypes anymore?
Rao: Crash testing can be simulated with high degree of confidence as can durability MVH, drag coefficient.

Jones: For crash testing, the amount of physical prototyping has come down from fifty prototypes to five. The models that are being built are increasing in fidelity. Before, a crash model used to have half a million elements. Now, you have a model which has five million elements.

Rao: On the rendering front, software simulates texture, feel etc. Still people feel comfortable to see at least one full scale prototype before they sign off on a major decision.

What are your goals for the next couple of years?
Jones: OEMs understand the power of the technology but they have established design processes and they have to work out how to introduce it into the process.

Who’s using this technology today?
Jones: Most auto- and aero-OEMs are using our technology. Airbus is probably from the optimization point of view our biggest client. We have about 11 people working for them. We have some good auto clients.

Rao: India is important because new products are developed here. It’s not just conversion or indigenization. We work for Indian OEMs and MNCs in consumer goods and other areas in addition to automotive. We are facilitating process-driven product development. We tell them to pull the CAE upstream and make it a gateway for the sign off of concept, styling, detail decisions etc. There’s an opportunity to reduce the gap between product development in India and in the US. Today, the product development cycle in India is 18-22 months. It can be brought down to 11-12 months, which is where the MNCs are.

Other than automotive and aerospace, where else do you play?
Jones: In the consumer goods market, Unilever and P&G are producing a large number of units of, maybe, deodorant spray, and we get involved in shaving grams off the mass of the product. That makes a big difference in the secondary and tertiary packaging.

Is the Cloud having any affect on your line of work?
Jones: There’s still a barrier in terms of file transfers when it comes to working in the Cloud. There’s some work on remote visualization but we still rely on local computing.

Is 3D printing going to be of use in this area?
Jones: There are some interesting developments in 3D printing. For us, it’s all about the industrialization of our designs and 3D printing potentially holds a gateway to be more flexible in manufacturing.