The Process Manufacturer’s Toolbox – How Altair’s solutions help you achieve your goals
Process manufacturing industries such as chemical, food and beverage, pharmaceutical, and paint rely on carefully designed systems with many complex processes to ensure they achieve specific goals. These systems and processes involve everything from system modeling and structural simulation to machine building tools. Here at Altair, we offer a variety of tools for process manufacturers to help achieve these goals, assisting in some of the most complex situations. Read on to see how Altair can help you.
System Modeling
Within process manufacturing, machines are an integral part of the production process, performing a range of increasingly complex functions and tasks. The combination of mechanical structures and mechanisms with sensors, actuators, and computing power has changed product performance expectations. Understanding how these systems operate is highly important.
New process manufacturing systems require full-system simulation to drive the mechanical, electrical, and control requirements necessary to deliver outstanding customer experiences. Altair math and system design products include concept studies, control design, multi-domain system performance optimization, controller implementation, and testing.
Activate® provides an open integration platform for modeling, simulating, and optimizing multi-disciplinary systems-of-systems using inherent 1D block diagrams. Users have the option to include subsystem models either from Altair’s 3D tools, such as MotionSolve™ and Flux™, or from 3rd-party tools. Models can also be imported from Simulink®.
Structural Simulation
Simulation-driven design deployed early in development is proven to significantly reduce expensive prototype-builds and physical testing. Inspire™ easily generates dynamic motion simulations of complex mechanisms, automatically identifying contacts, joints, springs, and dampers. Forces obtained from a motion analysis are automatically applied as inputs to a structural analysis or optimization and can be used to determine initial requirements for motors and actuators.
Numerical Modeling
One simulation tool for process manufacturing is discrete element modeling (DEM), a valuable predictive tool for simulating and optimizing a range of processes including mixing, coating, die filling and spreading. It provides key information on processes otherwise difficult or sometimes impossible to obtain using experiments. EDEM™ can simulate the mixing process of powders, tablets, aggregates, and other granular materials providing users with fundamental information such as the particle velocities and trajectories. Watch the tutorial video below to see how easy it it is to set up a tablet mixer model and perform varied analyses on the results.
Computational Fluid Dynamics
The range of CFD applications encountered in process manufacturing varies tremendously depending on the industry. The solutions often involve single and multiphase flows, incompressible and compressible flows, and isothermal and non-isothermal problems. Multiphysics are common, involving complex interactions between fluids and moving parts. For example, in food processing applications, you may want to look at convective heat transfer with hot/cold air during the coating process. AcuSolve™ provides powerful fluid flow analysis capabilities which can be coupled with EDEM to execute multiphysics simulation
Multi-body Dynamics
By considering realistic motion-induced loads and environmental effects, engineers and designers can be confident that their products, when made and operated, will perform reliably, meet durability requirements, and not vibrate excessively or fail from fatigue.
As a tool for simulating ever-smarter products as systems-of-systems, MotionSolve facilitates multi-disciplinary collaboration across product development teams. For example, it enables the combined simulation of subsystems for mechanical plants together with those for electrical/electronic subsystems (e.g., controllers)
Machine Building Tools
Today’s machine builders are creating products that are increasingly intelligent to differentiate them in a crowded marketplace and to meet the production demands of their clients. This shift is facilitated by highly accurate machine simulation technologies which can allow companies to test concepts, tune productivity limits, take advantage of predictive maintenance capabilities, and more.
Quality in the development process - With simulations solutions from Altair, product quality is increased through more accurate and predictive virtual models, enabling the identification of cause-effect relationships and load determination in the simulation model. Synergies are also created through closer cooperation with the help of straightforward linkage of mechatronic sub-models to a machine simulation of the overall system.
Technical Risk Reduction - Through a consistent understanding of the overall system thanks to easy-to-use connections between the models of mechanical design, drive development, and control technology, users can achieve higher cycle rates without sacrificing quality or reliability, reducing technical risks in contracts with 3D simulation and system-of-systems considerations.
Closer to Reality - By create more accurate 3D simulations of machine elements for load determination for drive and control, it is possible to optimize their interaction to enhance machine operation and minimize downtime. Vibration problems can be represented and eliminated comprehensively, drives can be designed process-dependent, control concepts can be laid out, and control parameters can be optimized.
Build Improved Next Generation Equipment - Design and engineer better versions of equipment using performance data and the real life environmental and loading conditions of the current equipment in operation
Smart Product Development - Building intelligent machines requires an integrated approach, accounting for communication to and from the equipment for analysis and control, as well as structural, EMI/EMC, cooling, and edge connectivity aspects of the development. A combination of concept design, engineering, embedded based control systems, data acquisition and control looping, and data analytics are therefore all necessary to complete the intelligence loop. To learn more about smart technology within process manufacturing, read this article.
To learn more about Altair’s solutions within Process Manufacturing, read our eguide.