Maximizing Innovation in e-Motor Design Using Multiphysics Design Strategies

Automation is conquering more and more areas, both in the real world, for example in the form of handling robots, and in the virtual world. Many software packages make it possible to set up workflows that digitally map processes and fire actions such as sending out information via e-mail. It is almost always a matter of shifting recurring activities from humans to machines and thus relieving them. The Bremen-based startup ELISE has developed a solution that has the potential to free designers from routine tasks in product development as well.

Speaker systems are practically mandatory in automobiles today as they are a big part of the modern features that resonate with quality, user experience and luxury. The article - originally published by SIA on issue #874 of "Ingénieurs de l'auto" - explains the challenges of designing loudspeakers for vehicles and how Altair technologies can help attain the best combination of sound, vibration, and perceived quality performance.

Digital technology has changed the landscape of manufacturing and product creation: Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), and data analytics are connecting organizations, generating data, driving more intelligent operations, and unlocking potential like never before. New skills are needed in the world of connected products and the success of innovation will depend on companies’ digital capabilities. This is why the investments geared toward adoption of digital technologies, products, and services that allow companies to thrive in the fast-evolving economic environment is growing. This white paper outlines the steps necessary to implement machine learning predictive models for connected products using Altair Data Analytics solutions.

Contemporary automotive market demand has led to a wealth of new applications requiring strong performance in cost-effective optical systems. Requirements for these systems require modern software capability for both optical design and engineering. This article presents a discussion of optical design and analysis for a quality automotive head-up display (HUD) system using Lambda Research Corporation’s Optics Software for Layout and Optimization (OSLO) and TracePro, available through the Altair Partner Alliance. These products are designed to work in tandem to effectively solve a wide array of problems in optics.

The International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNIRP) has published on March 2020 an update of the guidelines for limiting exposure to electromagnetic fields (100 kHz to 300 GHz). This white paper describes how to evaluate the compliance regarding the basis restrictions of ICNIRP by numerical field simulation with the simulation software Altair Feko.

High-performance computing (HPC) has emerged as an essential technology in modern design and development environments. Driven by increased competitive pressures, manufacturers increasingly compete based on their computer-aided engineering (CAE) and HPC infrastructure environments. Deploying and managing HPC infrastructure is challenging, however. HPC clusters are complex and costly to deploy and require specialized skills across multiple domains to manage and maintain them effectively. As a result, engineering teams can spend much of their time managing the HPC environment rather than focusing on more productive work. This can lead to higher costs and longer design cycles due to reduced productivity. This paper will explore this dilemma and explain how turnkey HPC appliances from Altair and Intel can dramatically simplify HPC cluster deployment and management. It will show how the Altair Unlimited™ appliance powered by state-of-the-art Intel® Xeon® processors can reduce simulation time, reduce costs, and improve overall productivity and efficiency.

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems use electromagnetic (EM) waveform transmissions to illuminate objects, and images are created from processing reflections or echoes. SAR systems are now widely deployed to support critical remote mapping/sensing capabilities. SAR transmitters are typically installed on moving airborne or satellite platforms to operate at stand-off ranges and collect terrain data measurements. The measured data, collected from multiple passes/scans is interpreted by advanced SAR interferometry algorithms into surface terrain maps to help discriminate (detect) key landscape features, e.g., fault lines, bodies of water, forests and vegetation, glaciers, etc. Some of the most technical tasks include discriminating foliage in mapped terrains, identifying forest types, discerning tree heights, and detecting anomalies or hidden objects beneath foliage - termed the foliage penetration (FOPEN) problem. Due to the increasing interest in using higher Ku-band frequencies (12-18 GHz) for FOPEN, there is a growing need to quantify the interaction of foliage with Ku-band frequencies for consulting purposes; and to aid with enhanced technology support for applications in both the commercial and military domains. Overall, this important area remains largely unaddressed in the modeling realm today because of the required heavy model detail and substantial computational resources. This technical paper lays out a FOPEN modeling methodology that introduces a range of new innovations and contributions to address the phenomenology of Ku-band EM wave transmissions through moderate foliage. Two highly detailed computer-aided design (CAD) tree models were created using an open source tree generating software. Due the level of details of tree models, Altair HyperMesh is used for geometry editing and cleaning and then Altair Feko is used for FOPEN computational electromagnetic (CEM) behaviors at L- and Ku-band are characterized.

In this paper, we illustrate a simulation-driven workflow process using Altair HyperWorks Suite for antennas to meet environmental specifications during the design process so time taken for test and certification can be minimized and thus, cost savings and faster product development cycles.

The International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNIRP) has published in March 2020 an update [1] of the guidelines for limiting exposure to electromagnetic fields (100 kHz to 300 GHz). This white paper describes how to evaluate the compliance regarding the basis restrictions of ICNIRP by numerical field simulation with the simulation software Altair Feko™.

Solve pressure oscillation problems with rapid analysis of acoustic behavior of arbitrary pipe (and hose) networks through DSHplus & Altair HyperStudy.

In a joint project MX3D, ABB, and Altair demonstrated how a 3D printed robot can be improved by using a digital twin process to achieve more precise positioning.

Electric vehicles (EV) offer the exciting possibility to meet the world’s transportation demands in an environmentally sustainable way. Mass adoption could help reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, but the lithium-ion (Li-on) batteries that power them still present unique challenges to designers and engineers, primary among them to ensuring safety against battery fire. To achieve vehicle manufacturer’s ambitious adoption goals, it is necessary to improve the safety of Li-on batteries by better understanding all of the complex, interconnected aspects of their behavior across both normal and extreme duty cycles. Altair is focused on developing a comprehensive understanding of automotive battery safety issues which it has named the Altair Battery Designer project. It combines innovative design methods and tools to model and predict mechanical damage phenomena as well as thermal and electro-chemical runaway. Altair has developed an efficient way to calculate mechanical and short-term thermal response to mechanical abuses, providing accurate computational models and engineer-friendly methods to design a better battery.

Fairshare is a powerful tool for sharing resources and allocating a set amount of your cluster to entities like users, groups, and projects. This white paper will get you up and running with basic fairshare on Altair PBS Professional.

In the race to deliver safe new vehicles, efficient and accurate simulation of structural performance under different crash scenarios is a key alternative costly physical testing. With growing model complexity, the demand for CPUs is increasing. To assure a fast job turnaround time, HPC and solver scalability is critical. This article shows that by working together with market-leading hardware developers to keep one step ahead of customer needs, Altair Radioss™ offers fast, efficient structural analysis irrespective of the hardware the solver is running on: scalability is proven and assured.

Today, an e-motor cannot be developed just by looking at the motor as an isolated unit; tight requirements concerning the integration into both the complete electric or hybrid drivetrain system and perceived quality must be met. Multi-disciplinary and multiphysics optimization methodologies make it possible to design an e-motor for multiple, completely different design requirements simultaneously, thus avoiding a serial development strategy, where a larger number of design iterations are necessary to fulfill all requirements and unfavorable design compromises need to be accepted.

The project described in this paper is focused on multiphysics design of an e-motor for Porsche AG. Altair’s simulation-driven approach supports the development of e-motors using a series of optimization intensive phases building on each other. This technical paper offers insights on how the advanced drivetrain development team at Porsche AG, together with Altair, has approached the challenge of improving the total design balance in e-motor development.

A look at three challenges facing the automotive industry and illustrate how an engineered, highly efficient CFD workflow is helping companies meet them.

Thermal analysis is a key factor when designing motors. We propose to link the studies of electromagnetic and thermal aspects in transient application with Finite Element Method (FEM) to represent the thermal state of motor with higher accuracy. As electromagnetic response time is different of thermal response time, an original method is used for extracting average values on one magnetic period of losses (Joule and iron losses), and to use them as input for the transient thermal analysis. So, the temperature in different parts of the motor is extracted, and brought back as input for the next electromagnetic computation.

This paper describes the effect of air-gap variation on performance of a 28 pole axial flux permanent magnet motor (AFPM) with concentrated stator winding. The AFPM is modeled using three-dimensional finite-element method. This model includes all geometrical and physical characteristics of the machine components.

Abstract- The paper presents a FEM approach for studying the influence of the capacitor value on the magnetic noise of a network and inverter-fed permanent split-capacitor induction motor. A 4 pole, 24 stator slots and 30 rotor slots, induction motor is modeled under Flux2D Finite Element software in order to determine the amplitude and frequency spectrum of the magnetic forces acting on the stator. The effects of the inverter supply are taken into account by coupling Flux2D with Matlab/Simulink. The results are compared with those obtained from noise measurements performed on the studied motor.

Elimination of hot spots and reduction of eddy current losses in structural parts is one of the important constituents of transformer design. In this work, the eddy current losses in the clamping frame, transformer tank and electromagnetic shielding are calculated using a 3D finite element method. The clamping frame, transformer tank and electromagnetic shielding are modeled by surface impedance method. The paper analyses the effects of electromagnetic shielding and magnetic shunts on the eddy current loss reduction in the transformer tank.

This paper presents a study on the influence of the discretisation of the inductance curves on a detailed coupled circuit model of a synchronous generator with a damper winding and search coils. The self and mutual inductances of all coupled circuit are computed in magnetostatic with a 2D finite-element method (FEM) for different rotor positions.

Flux Conference 2012 presentation

This paper presents an adapted partial element equivalent circuit (PEEC)-based methodology applied to the modeling of interconnections of power electronics devices. Although this method is already well known, the originality of this work is its use to model a device presenting an industrial complexity.

In recent years, an innovative DC induction heating concept has been proposed in order to increase the efficiency of the induction heating of low electrical resistivity metal billets [1-3]. In this approach the billet is forced to rotate inside a transverse DC magnetic field by means of an electric motor drive

ABSTRACT. Temperature control of magnetic controllers (concentrators, cores, shields, shunts) is an essential part of the induction coil design. Prediction and study of the coil copper have been described in a presentation “Influence of Cooling Conditions on Induction Coil Copper Temperatures” (V. Nemkov, R. Goldstein) [1]. That study was made using Flux 2D computer simulation program.

In the present paper, two simulation strategies for tube induction welding process are presented. Coupled electromagnetic and thermal problem is solved by applying three-dimensional FEM models. The resulting power density and temperature distribution are compared. Reported strategies can be used to design tube induction welding devices and to verify the influence of the main parameters of the process, i.e. welding velocity, frequency, specific and total power.

Presented at the 2015 Flux Conference

Learn more about how MapleSim is uniquely designed to handle sophisticated systems to minimize your development time and costs.

The field of energy storage is extremely active with a constant stream of innovations being deployed to address some major design challenges. At the heart of this activity is the commercial drive to increase energy density (energy stored per unit mass), extend battery life and improve overall charge/discharge efficiencies in order to reduce unit costs and enhance product reliability. While great progress has been made in the last decade, certain industries still have a long way to go.

Robotic technology has improved dramatically in the past decade, and applications are getting more exciting as well. Robots are cool again, and for engineers, designing the new generation of robots is one of the most exciting types of projects. While the prior generations stunned the world by sending men to the moon in the 1960s, this generation will soon make a robot dance better than Michael Jackson using new engineering and scientific techniques that empower and fuel the rapid pace of innovation within the modern robotics community. In the end, what was once the stuff of science fiction seems to be within reach for the engineering community.

Maplesoft has developed a MapleSim library of components, transmission sub-assemblies, and complete powertrain examples that show the use of these components in driveline applications. Built with guidance from several transmission manufacturers, this MapleSim library allows you to mix the best of physical models and empirical data to maximize model fidelity, optimize your designs, and improve overall vehicle fuel-efficiency.

This paper discusses the behavior of a flexible flap at the rear end of a generic car model under aerodynamic loads. A strong bidirectional coupling between the flap’s deflection and the flow field exists which requires this system to be simulated in a coupled fluid-structure manner.

The PBS Professional scheduler provides many different methods for optimizing scheduling. Placement sets, also referred to as topology-aware scheduling, can be used to group nodes together based on a shared characteristic to help optimize job performance as well as the overall use of your PBS Professional complex. Common usages include taking advantage of interconnect or hardware topology including IRUs or racks, system resources, access to shared storage, system location, and application availability.

Fairshare is a PBS Professional scheduling tool designed to share a cluster’s limited resources according to cluster usage history and allocated percentage. It's the most direct option to grant a percentage of shared resources on the cluster to users, projects, or groups. This white paper covers the creation and management of the fairshare tree structure for your PBS complex. It also covers basic settings and describes concepts of shares within the fairshare tree. Understanding, calculating, and managing entity usage data will not be covered herein. It assumes your familiarity with basic fairshare setup along with the limitations and caveats fairshare has with other PBS Professional scheduling tools. Enabling basic fairshare does not consider fairshare tree capabilities and structure or describe how to create and manage the tree. Granting a percentage of the cluster to individual users may not be viable; the use of your cluster may instead be defined with respect to queues, projects, or accounting. Further, some users may span across multiple groups. Your site’s policy may require the restriction of cluster use to only known entities. PBS Professional’s weighted rooted tree structure provides the opportunity to group entities together and finely manage the balance of resources on your cluster. Adapting resource usage allows you to dictate tracked resources and apply a formula to balance those resources according to your site’s needs.

An organization’s software asset management (SAM) team wears many hats. Team members are responsible for setting up and maintaining license servers, installing licenses, ensuring compliance, assisting users, monitoring license availability, and generating usage reports. At many companies they also perform requirements analysis, remix software pools, manage contracts, and negotiate new contracts with vendors. This paper explores the top 10 issues license administrators face and how each can be tackled using Altair Monitor™.

In electronic design automation (EDA) and other areas of computer-aided design (CAD) that utilize expensive software tools, centralization of license servers has become the norm. High software asset utilization is achieved by sharing a common pool of licenses with a large group of engineers, regardless of their locations. While this model provides many advantages over maintaining license servers at multiple locations, it also has risks. License availability becomes even more important once all your software licenses serving multiple sites are centralized. A license server failure of any kind has the potential to impact the entire company, as license servers provide licenses to mission-critical applications. Downtime may cost millions in schedule slippage. Tools that monitor the server, CPU load, file system, license daemons, and individual license features become essential. Altair Monitor™ is a a robust, enterprise-grade license monitoring solution that delivers a complete set of monitoring functions.

Semiconductor companies typically run jobs by queuing them up, then using a job scheduler to dispatch them onto available cores in server farms while pulling EDA tool licenses from a license server. There are two primary goals facing organizations, and they’re somewhat at odds with each other: first, maximizing the utilization of server farms and software licenses and second, running jobs with minimal latency so users aren’t delayed. The easiest way to satisfy the requirements of high utilization and low latency is to maximize the number of short-duration jobs. Just as it is easier to fill a bucket with sand than it is with large rocks, short jobs give the scheduler increased flexibility in what jobs to run and when. Short jobs will not block or occupy a resource for long periods and are therefore not likely to impede the progress of higher-priority jobs arriving in the queue. Altair Accelerator™ is an agile, fully featured scheduler optimized for today’s EDA workloads. The most important difference between Accelerator and other popular schedulers is its event-driven architecture, which allows it to schedule a new job immediately when compute resources and software licenses become available.

Every semiconductor design group uses some sort of job scheduler, whether it is selected by a corporate IT department or by the group itself. At a high level, the function of a job scheduler is simple: Be aware of what is in the queue and what hardware and software license resources are available and make good decisions about what jobs to schedule when. In practice there are a several subtle issues that are just as important, including job mix, prioritization, and ease of support. While every company is unique, the issues surrounding job scheduling are often related to company size or, more accurately, the size of the compute farm and design teams. Altair Accelerator™ is a high-throughput, enterprise-grade job scheduler designed to meet the complex demands of semiconductor design, EDA, and high-performance computing (HPC). It’s a highly adaptable solution capable of managing compute infrastructures from small, dedicated server farms to complex, distributed environments.

The software tool OpenFOAM is used extensively in high-performance computing (HPC) to create simulations but is known to have challenging I/O patterns. To uncover the reasons why, we profiled OpenFOAM with the Altair Breeze™ and Altair Mistral™ I/O profiling tools on the Oracle bare metal cloud. The results detailed in this white paper provide a clear picture about why OpenFOAM performs slowly at times and highlight key areas for improvement.

Diamond Light Source is the UK’s national synchrotron or particle accelerator. It works like a giant microscope, harnessing the power of electrons to produce bright light that scientists can use to study anything from fossils to jet engines to viruses and vaccines. Because Diamond Light Source handles a wider variety of workloads than many, performance of both in-house and third-party applications is vital. The team, which employs Altair® Grid Engine® for workload management, used Altair Mistral™ to identify straightforward improvements that could be made to improve performance and cut down runtime.