Altair Engineering has announced that French engineering firm MCE-5 Development has selected the Altair HyperWorks Suite to design all mechanical parts of its VCRi low-emission engine.
MCE-5 Development engineers primarily use Altair’s HyperMesh, OptiStruct and HyperView solutions to optimise the weight of each component of the new engine, while keeping the stiffness and the stresses within the range of the values required by new design. Additionally MCE-5 Development leveraged the HyperWorks Enabled Community (HWEC) and its HyperWorks licences to use partner products that address fatigue and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations when needed. Those tools can be used at no additional costs under the flexible Altair licensing system.
The MCE-5 engine is based on a variable compression ratio (VCR) approach. While the architecture of the MCE-5 VCRi engine enables it to withstand very high loads, individual components within the engine must be particularly hard wearing. To use the material efficiently in each component, engineers use HyperWorks to perform sophisticated non-linear simulations to evaluate the stiffness of and the stresses within the components.
MCE-5 Development engineers also use HyperWorks to redistribute material to increase stiffness, to lower stresses, and to reduce weight. During this development phase, OptiStruct, the optimisation solution of HyperWorks, is used to guarantee an optimal distribution of the material.
'The key factors for our decision were the performance of the Altair products and the flexibility of the HyperWorks licensing model,' said Vincent Collee, manager of simulation, testing and measurements for MCE-5 Development. 'The Altair offering under the Hyper Works Enabled Community program allows us to gain a huge economical advantage. On the performance side we are especially pleased with the capabilities of OptiStruct, the HyperWorks optimisation solution. It is a very efficient tool that enables us to develop components that reach an optimum of material distribution with only a few design iterations.'
