To meet the challenges that now confront us, we must introduce products that minimize weight while furnishing outstanding performance characteristics. Optimization tools are perfectly positioned to achieve these goals.
In our everyday lives, intelligent software, and inexpensive computing have revolutionized our access to information and the immediacy with which it is communicated (e.g. smart phones, social media). This new era of digital technology will also transform the product development process, with engineering data to generate optimum geometry.
Our increasing ability to make products lighter and therefore more portable and efficient largely parallels the evolution of computing systems. For some 25 years, designers and engineers have worked with software that helps them optimize product designs to reduce their weight, but the speeds of computer processors have been the limiting factor.
Optimization has received a boost in recent years from the urgent need to find ways to deal with various national and global crises—the fuel crisis, the economic crisis and the environmental crisis in particular. To meet the challenges that now confront us, we must introduce products that minimize weight while furnishing outstanding performance characteristics. Optimization tools are perfectly positioned to achieve these goals.
Machine creativity complementing human creativity
Today, optimization software guides the design of products in nearly every sector of production, and a primary reason is that computing power is no longer an expensive barrier. This remarkable software changes and strengthens the way that the designer and the engineer collaborate. Optimization processes can generate dozens—or even hundreds—of alternative design options, balancing light-weighting with product performance. Thus, optimization can inject innovation into the design process, providing the designer with configurations that may never have been conceived or considered without suggestions from the software.
For example, freeform optimization allows the designer merely to describe the space that the product should occupy and to apply the loads that the structure is expected to receive within that space. Optimization software then will “grow” the layout of a basic design that provides good direction for meeting the criteria. Further, this software can suggest forms that are more conducive to a particular material or manufacturing process than those created by traditional methods. At other times, optimization software may be used to evaluate the layout of a specific design, finding ways to tweak or reshape it to make the product lighter while retaining its performance characteristics.
In each of these ways, a design evolves without being burdened by previous design history. Rather, the designer is using machine creativity to complement his or her own creativity.
In an increasingly competitive environment, today’s products are becoming more highly engineered to make lighter-weight and environmentally efficient devices. Designers and engineers no longer can afford to look at optimization simply as a tactical tool; it needs to be more of a strategic part of the process for designing product structures.
How optimization helps with decision-making
Every designer is constantly juggling many different issues: How do I package this system? How do I manufacture it? How do I make it more efficient? How do I remove weight without impacting the system’s durability? Optimization furnishes workable answers. It may come up with a completely new way to support the package or simply give the designer additional confidence in his or her initial thinking about a product.
Optimization can generate innovation, because it employs a very deep computer program with an amazing amount of physics behind it. This software reflects the results of many man-years of development and today is a very sophisticated piece of technology that uses a tremendous array of math and physics know-how. The software operates with millions of lines of computer code behind it to determine the best structure for a product and tell the designer what stresses and strains the optimized structure will bear.
The driving force behind much of today’s product design certainly is weight savings and achieving light-weighting without compromise to structural performance. With optimization software the automotive industry has been able to attain a weight reduction of 10 to 15 percent, substantially improving fuel economy and thereby lessening emissions. In some cases, however, performance is more important than weight, and the optimization process can be applied to focus on other factors, such as reducing fatigue. The software understands the tradeoffs between weight and performance and can provide alternatives to meet any objective.
Furthermore, optimization can significantly increase productivity within the engineering environment. It can reduce the time required to design a product, because the computer creates the design iterations automatically and rapidly, rather than relying purely on the designer to spend many hours to develop alternatives. As a result of a significantly shortened design time, products can be brought to market much more rapidly.
Overall, then, optimization software can offer insight into what is driving an engineering system. It provides information on the factors that are driving a particular design so that designers and engineers can learn more about that design and produce a better product.
The future of optimization
Clearly, optimization software is an ideal tool for many important emerging manufacturing processes, such as nanotechnology and 3D printing. These processes give more freedom to the manufacturer, and that ability to free up the production process is well aligned with optimization.
Currently, optimization software is helping designers incorporate new materials, like composites, into their product designs. The software enables engineers to compare the efficiency of metal and composite for a particular component or system by comparing an optimized metallic structure against an optimized composite structure.
Software also plays an important part in designing safer products and vehicles. For instance, in designing a car to protect occupants in a crash, optimization can help engineers ensure that head-impact parameters are minimized.
As designers and engineers gain more confidence in the properties of composite materials, they are extending the usage of these materials to more arenas, and optimization becomes a crucial part of the decision-making process when considering whether composites can provide the required performance along with their weight reduction.
In recent years, Boeing has engaged in a massive deployment of optimization for development of its recently released 787 Dreamliner, 50 percent of which is built from composites, and Europe’s Airbus has used optimization extensively for its A350 aircraft. China’s Shanghai Automotive deployed optimization aggressively as a way to dramatically shorten the go-to-market timeframe of its Roewe 550 vehicle, starting production just two-and-a-half years after development of the vehicle’s initial concept. In packaged goods, Unilever used optimization to develop its distinctive Axe deodorant cap design.
Optimization, in fact, is being used to help design everything from microchips to turbochargers, from washing machines to sporting goods, and it is likely to continue paving the way for new branches of product design and manufacturing, such as the development of future biomedical devices, which require the type of performance consistency that optimization can help ensure.
However the designer may choose to employ optimization software, three important points should always be considered:
1. Optimization will not operate against the laws of physics. It’s not a magic box. Rather, optimization software is a technology that complements smart engineering. A good engineer wants good engineering tools, and that is the role that optimization software plays. Even freeform optimization is a marriage of skills and of creativity between engineer and machine.2. Optimization should be applied as early in the design process as possible. The largest gains are to be made when the largest decisions are still to be made and when fewer constraints have been placed on the design. The up-front freedom inherent in the design process means that optimization software can help the designer explore more options and design innovations.
3. Understand that optimization software requires very little training for anyone familiar with basic computer-aided engineering tools and therefore should be deployed as widely as practical. In the future, everyone will need to use optimization software at some point in the design process, so the more rapidly they embrace it, the more quickly they can take advantage of its business benefits.
While optimization may not yet be a fully integrated part of the design process, it is likely to become so very soon. Designers and engineers see the power of this technology for improving productivity and performance while removing weight from products. In examining the impact that optimization software can have on improving products, more companies are seeing its potential.
