Simulation tool advancements speed design process and improve products

The stakes have always been high for new product design and development, whether dealing with individual components or complete systems. It seems that the risk factors and time-to-market pressures are continuing to grow. And, given the current economic climate, companies are facing increasing demands to reduce costs and become more competitive in the world market. This is no easy task considering the complexity, integration, and technology requirements demanded by today’s product designs.

To meet these challenges, design and development teams rely on increased testing early in the design phase. However, physical testing is expensive and time-consuming and often fails to provide sufficient data. Consequently, it is no wonder that product development teams are embracing simulation tools as an essential part of the design phase.

Value of virtual prototyping

Early stages of the design process provide the best window of opportunity to significantly affect how an application’s characteristics are outlined and identified. However, this is also the time when product requirements and specifications are not well-defined, requiring considerable trial and error. The appeal of prototyping with simulation has made the concept of virtual prototyping popular among product development teams, allowing them to investigate a broad range of system attributes prior to large investments in manufacturing.

Virtual prototyping provides a substantial value both in low- and high-volume manufacturing environments. Low-volume aircraft and spacecraft manufacturers have excessive cost implications of failure. High-volume manufacturers of electronics and consumer products constantly face the challenges of time to market, reliability and warranty issues, material savings, and continued innovation.

With consistent use of virtual prototyping, designers can realize several benefits:

• Increased design envelope: Simulation enables engineers to test for wider ranges of conditions that might be difficult to explore using physical prototypes. When changes are easier and less expensive to make, designers can shorten cycles and improve quality by verifying functionality earlier in the design phase.
• Improved knowledge: Simulation and modeling tools provide an environment wherein designers are better able to observe and analyze their design’s behavior. Virtual prototyping can provide valuable insight and guidance by offering the ability to analyze complex interactions with greater accuracy and more realistic results. Virtual prototyping can also be instrumental in helping engineers understand issues with existing designs, how these issues relate to continuous process improvements, and ways to maximize reuse to leverage investments.
• System analysis: Though useful, getting comprehensive data from a complete system is difficult to obtain from physical prototypes. Virtual prototypes, on the other hand, can be assembled to analyze the effect of a design change on system performance and dismantled for a closer look at a component’s behavior.
• Safety: Physical testing requires higher expenses to maintain large testing facilities, employ more personnel, and abide by stringent OSHA or other government safety regulations. Virtual testing can overcome these constraints while providing accurate results needed to improve designs.

Multidisciplinary simulation

While simulation helps reduce design costs and improve efficiencies, traditional approaches are limited to single disciplines. In other words, each software specializes in a specific aspect of test such as static loading, impact, and thermal effects. This means that designers and analysts must use multiple software products to obtain more comprehensive knowledge of system behavior, resulting in time and cost inefficiencies as well as incomplete information.

To fill this gap, simulation tools are attempting to address the wide range of disciplines that a product experiences. Accounting for multidisciplinary behavior can be as simple as examining a system for static load, modal analysis, and/or transient dynamics. On the other hand, it can be as complex as conducting multibody dynamic analysis and impact studies of a system or specific components of a system, with loads that include thermal, electromagnetic, fluid, and so on (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: A microprocessor-solder-PCB assembly is subjected to both electrical and thermal loads. To test for stress-free temperature variants, simulation software tools use a microthermal actuator and simulate the ceramic BGA and the different components to be analyzed. (click graphic to zoom by 1.9x)

For example, imagine a car skidding on a road. While it skids, a multibody dynamic analysis simulates its behavior quickly and accurately. However, if an impact model is needed, designers have to consider the car’s velocity and acceleration. For an accurate simulation, the information from the multibody dynamic study must be passed to the crash study software. Furthermore, if the vehicle is equipped with an Electronic Stability Control (ESC) system, its response will be different, so the effect of the ESC system must be accounted for to obtain an accurate analysis. Without a multidisciplinary solution, communication between these various software products is handled manually, which can lead to inaccuracies and inefficiencies.

MD Solutions from MSC.Software is focused on addressing multidisciplinary issues by providing smooth data transfer from one disciplinary analysis to another. In this case, mechatronics and multibody dynamics capabilities can be used to simulate the automobile’s motion during skidding. Kinetic data can then be used to carry out a stress analysis and failure studies of the vehicle upon crash.

Examples of multidisciplinary analyses are abundant in the electronics industry. A few examples include:

• Cell phone, computer, and other consumer electronics: Thermal analysis of a circuit board; soldering and motion analysis of a cell phone-flipping mechanism; stress analysis that can be caused by mechanical, Joule heating, or environmental conditions; and drop test studies
• Switches: Joule heating and mechanical analysis
• Motors and hard drives: Dynamic analysis, stress analysis, thermal response studies, and piezoelectricity
• MEMS: Electrical, thermal, and structural analysis

Democratizing technology

While simulation tools have been adopted in several industries, they have in the past required specialized knowledge and experience, which separated analysis teams from design teams. To improve communication between various groups in a company and between OEMs and suppliers, new automation methodologies are gaining increased usage.

Each company and engineering group amasses a great deal of knowledge and resources related to their design and development processes. Unless stored in a consistent and easily reusable form, this information is not effectively utilized and could get forgotten and lost.

Simulation tools available today can help engineering groups take advantage of their best practices by creating and reusing templates that simplify repeatable tasks. Capitalizing on best practices knowledge, designers can further automate processes by building templates for tasks that encompass multiple disciplines. Once templates are created, they can be shared with other members of the design, development, or manufacturing teams throughout the enterprise supply chain. Using template-based simulation also provides the ability to use simulation earlier in the development process as it exposes the power of simulation to various users in a controlled manner.

With broad-based simulation use comes the challenge of managing the mass of data created by multitudes of simulations. Engineers are turning to products such as SimManager to manage data created from multiple analysis tools (see Figure 2). In addition to serving as a data-tracking system, this software framework maintains the entire pedigree of data that can help resolve any warranty or regulatory issues that might arise in future. Using this type of product, the entire simulation process can be controlled and made accessible to engineers across the enterprise so that the entire design team can reap the benefits of exciting advances in simulation.

Figure 2: Using simulation software tools such as SimManager to control data created from multiple analyses, engineers can integrate enterprise-based simulation into the design process. (click graphic to zoom by 1.9x)

Accomplishing more with less

Today’s simulation software tools solve the growing design problem of how to do more with less. With the increasing market pressures on electronics equipment suppliers, this new generation of simulation tools helps the entire design and development team work smarter with scalable, open platforms. Adding simulation to the product development process as early as possible provides the resource for greater innovation and the ability to streamline critical design element testing.

Ted Pawela is the VP of marketing at MSC.Software, based in Santa Ana, California. He has 25 years of experience in the engineering software industry and has held various technical and business roles at MSC.Software including product management and marketing. Ted has a Bachelor’s degree from Florida Institute of Technology and a Master’s degree from Michigan State University.

MSC.Software 714-540-8900 ted.pawela@mscsoftware.com www.mscsoftware.com