DEMOCRATIZING WHEEL DESIGN
About the Customer
Accuride Corporation is a leading global manufacturer and supplier of high-quality, innovative products for the transportation industry. The company offers a comprehensive range of wheels and wheel-end components, including steel and aluminum wheels, suspension systems, and braking systems.
Their Challenge
When developing truck and passenger wheels, creating a solid hexahedral mesh is one of the most time consuming tasks that needs to be completed. While the geometry preparation and modeling requires an in-depth knowledge of advanced meshing techniques and component quality standards, the meshing of a rounded volume is also arduous.
Furthermore, only a few engineers at Accuride had the necessary experience to handle this task, which means that time-critical projects might be on hold until they can finish this vital step. Sharing this meshing knowledge beyond department boundaries to include others in the development process – including simulation beginners – has been difficult for Accuride.
Our Solution
To solve this challenge, Accuride worked with Altair to develop an automated solution that cuts
down the time teams need to spend on preparing surfaces and elements, which lightens overall
development efforts. Using the model build and assembly tools of Altair® HyperWorks®, like HyperMesh, the team developed a process that allowed engineers to manage multiple configurations, mesh variants, and part instances and become knowledgeable about the process, outside of the FE (Finite Element) experts.
By providing excellent building blocks for an automated solution, HyperWorks automates the Hexa-Mesh creation of truck and passenger car wheels based on provided user inputs like element size, the density of the solid mesh, and more, in a customized graphical user interface (GUI). The automated HyperWorks solution enabled the Accuride team to run a complete analysis and deliver reliable results in a much shorter timeframe.
LEFT: Accuride engineers were able to mesh complex parts, like the model with over 160k elements shown here, in minutes. RIGHT: Several FE modeling parameters – including element size, quality, and meshing techniques – can be controlled within the HyperWorks workflow.
Results
Together with Accuride, Altair developed a customized HyperWorks solution that fully automates
the Hexa-Mesh process of truck and passenger cars’ wheel assemblies. The new automated workflow reduced a process that used to take seven hours of manual work to a mere seven minutes, which is estimated to save Accuride up to 765 hours per year.
Thanks to the new process that covers the workflow from CAD geometry to a fully created Hexa-Mesh, teams can find everything they need to set up this simulation in a single platform. Democratizing simulation to also include more team members through a standardized, automated solution also ensures all teams and products meet Accuride’s high product standards.