DesIgn ProDuCT news - DPN Staff

8 Design Product News
dpncanada.com June/July 2007
Cover Story
Hitachi trucks receive full CAE
validation before fabrication
From Front Page
environment (altairengineering.ca).
Tempelman brought his HyperWorks and
analysis expertise from working on contrasting
applications like the Blackberry handheld
maker from Research in Motion and at logging
heavy equipment maker Timberjack. He noted
that no job is too big or too small for doing
detailed analysis on mechanical structures.
When he joined Hitachi in 2005, Tempelman’s
immediate focus was reducing the mass
of the welded steel cab structure while still
is a vital parameter for the big trucks Hitachi
the possibility of accidents. The cab has to stand
up to a variety of static, dynamic, and impact
loads to protect the operator. Hitachi engineers
Info Card 11
had been meeting
this challenge by
iterative designing
of the structure and
Video taken of a Hitachi Contruction Truck cab under stress testing matched the simulation
animation provided by HyperWorks.
element analysis
(FEA) to verify
Tempelman took a different approach using
HyperWorks. “We modeled the non-linear
uniaxial material and structure and transferred
the geometry native model directly into HyperMesh,”
said Tempelman. “Within a few
loadsets and learn where the steel should really
be, and we presented a report describing the
potential weight saving. The decision was to
move ahead using HyperWorks tools.”
He added that the design now has the material
where it is needed most, an important
factor for safety and for management trying
to lower steel costs in today’s expensive commodities
market.
plicit
analyses on the structure. The beauty of
we can easily modify the geometry, run anoth-
repeated what-if studies.”
A few days and multiple iterations later,
pany
ran the required physical tests on the
behaviors of the structure had been correctly
predicted using HyperWorks tools.
Hitachi no longer waits weeks for traditional
FEA and prototyping to show a design func-
ses
in a tenth of that time,” said Tempelman.
Tempelman has found Altair HyperView,
a visualization environment for simulation
and test data, to be extremely useful in sharing
analysis results with Hitachi managers and
to customers he meets on location around the
world.
-
pelman,
“a manager will say, ‘Explain this
to me.’ HyperView gives me a tremendous
capability for displaying results to the people
who approve funding for this work. Being
able to pull these results out of this black box
and share them with people who don’t have
the same level of technical knowledge is a
great advantage.”
Hitachi uses Altair MotionView and Mo-
truck. Applying motion analysis on a system
level to all subsystems – front axle, rear axle,
frame, cab, engine, and body – gives the company
the loads it needs to run detailed FEA
with excellent results.
Tempelman is also happy with the support
he has received from Altair. “Too many companies
come in and say, ‘Here’s the software.
Call me if you have questions.’ That doesn’t
will get a very good response. That’s important
to Hitachi and to me.”
According to Robert Little, president of
Altair Canada, productivity and mechanical
CAE go hand-in-hand. “Designers and stress
engineers are under double-digit productivity
time constraint pressures.”
Concluded Tempelman: “My equation for
success comes from having good people and
good tools.”
Info Card 339