Speaker design and analysis, especially for a more complex product, system, or component, often requires building multiple simulation models. The loudspeaker development process involves multi-physics and multiple sources in parallel, to multiple simulation runs for prototyping, testing, and validation. This results in separate models for nonlinear analysis of strength, thermal analysis and stiffness, noise, vibration, and acoustics. Even though each model isn’t always built from scratch, typically the use of different solvers for each attribute will require that models need to be converted from one solver format to another. This practice is not only time consuming but frequently error prone resulting in an inefficient use of engineering time.

The competitive consumer device industry has quick time-to-market deadlines. Smartphone cameras use voice coil motor (VCM) actuators to translate a lens in three degrees of freedom in order to bring an object to focus on the image plane and to optically stabilize the camera. To ensure optimal design, the Motorola Mobility team selected Altair Flux™ to simulate the entire VCM and camera system. Flux allowed the team to quickly validate designs and ensure that the part compatibility and camera performance met the design targets. Other devices within the phone, such as speakers, antenna shields, accessory magnets etc. can affect the VCM performance due to magnetic interference. With Flux, the team simulated the entire VCM and phone layout, accounting for all possible magnetic interference from other devices.

Sweden-based Nolato, a global provider of injection molded parts for numerous industrial and medical applications has developed Nolava as a collaborative project with companies including Altair and Avalon Innovation. Nolava is Nolato’s medical self-injector, a complex electro-mechanical device housed in an injection molded fiber-reinforced plastic body. Within this presentation different aspects of the product design cycle are considered, including co-simulations of the device operation during the actual injection process, misuse in case of forceful bending or opening of the loading tray, and drop tests of the autoinjector. Based on Altair’s optimization technology, alternatives for the rib structure of the casing are investigated. To assure manufacturability, molding and assembly simulations are performed to identify and mitigate problems likely to occur throughout the process.

In this webinar, Alexandre Luis Marangoni, Senior CAE Engineer at Whirlpool Corporation discusses how they validated SimSolid against FEA solver results, then implemented the tool into their concept design processes. SimSolid is used at Whirlpool to quickly evaluate concept feasibility, answer critical design questions, and deliver designs to project teams faster than ever before. Altair will demonstrate additional powerful functionality of SimSolid, preview the upcoming SimSolid 2020 release, and introduce an exciting new integration with Altair Inspire. Inspire's award winning user experience for geometry creation and modification can be learned in just a few hours, and now delivers SimSolid's speed and accuracy for structural analysis. For users without access to CAD software, Inspire and SimSolid combine to enable interactive geometry modification while analyzing large assemblies and complex parts, all within one common user interface.