Hyperworks Aids Development of Sailboat Structures
Altair Engineering has announced that ABstructures, which develops sailboat structures for yachts that participate in the America's Cup and the Volvo Ocean Race, has extended its use of Hyperworks. ABstructures has been using the Hyperworks suite since its foundation in 2008. The company initially employed Optistruct from the Hyperworks suite for topology optimisation, along with Hypermesh, the Hyperworks meshing tool. In December 2010, the company extended its use of Hyperworks to Radioss, the product suite's solver, to its development process for analysing the behaviour of composite materials.
Altair's new agreement with ABstructures includes the rental of 20,000 grid works units for 2011, providing the company with access to every product of the suite, including the use of Hyperworks Partner Alliance (HWPA) products at no additional costs. In the past, ABstructures applied the Hyperworks suite in the design of the winning Volvo Ocean Race yacht Ericsson 4 as well as the Ericsson 3 yacht. ABstructures is now using Hyperworks to design and optimise three yachts for the forthcoming Volvo Ocean Race and is structurally designing for Artemis Racing, which will participate in the next America's Cup in 2013 in San Francisco. To design and optimise the carbon structures of the yachts, ABstructures is using Hyperworks together with other computer-aided engineering (CAE) tools to simulate composites and fluid-structure interactions.
ABstructures has achieved fundamental structural improvements of all the yachts it has designed, compared with older-generation yachts. Dr Fabio Bressan of ABstructures said: 'When I first started to use Hyperworks, I was especially fond of its open platform and the ability to use it with any other available CAE or computer-aided design software. 'We also like the software suite because it enables us to handle most of the development tasks in structural design within one user interface and because it helps us to easily and quickly understand the challenges of our designs,' he added. 'We particularly appreciate the morphing function within Hypermesh that allows us to change the geometry of our model and have it ready for another simulation run in 10 minutes; without Hyperworks, that would probably take us up to two or three days,' said Dr Andrea Avaldi of ABstructures.
Altair's new agreement with ABstructures includes the rental of 20,000 grid works units for 2011, providing the company with access to every product of the suite, including the use of Hyperworks Partner Alliance (HWPA) products at no additional costs. In the past, ABstructures applied the Hyperworks suite in the design of the winning Volvo Ocean Race yacht Ericsson 4 as well as the Ericsson 3 yacht. ABstructures is now using Hyperworks to design and optimise three yachts for the forthcoming Volvo Ocean Race and is structurally designing for Artemis Racing, which will participate in the next America's Cup in 2013 in San Francisco. To design and optimise the carbon structures of the yachts, ABstructures is using Hyperworks together with other computer-aided engineering (CAE) tools to simulate composites and fluid-structure interactions.
ABstructures has achieved fundamental structural improvements of all the yachts it has designed, compared with older-generation yachts. Dr Fabio Bressan of ABstructures said: 'When I first started to use Hyperworks, I was especially fond of its open platform and the ability to use it with any other available CAE or computer-aided design software. 'We also like the software suite because it enables us to handle most of the development tasks in structural design within one user interface and because it helps us to easily and quickly understand the challenges of our designs,' he added. 'We particularly appreciate the morphing function within Hypermesh that allows us to change the geometry of our model and have it ready for another simulation run in 10 minutes; without Hyperworks, that would probably take us up to two or three days,' said Dr Andrea Avaldi of ABstructures.
Comments