UK-based Gordon Murray Design has used Altair Engineering’s HyperWorks product suite to develop its T.25 city car. The suite’s pre-processor HyperMesh was used to build and assemble the T.25 CAE model, which was subsequently analysed for a variety of load cases and performance measures using the suite's Radioss solver. The results were then post-processed and visualised in Altair HyperView.
The combined use of the HyperWorks tools helped the engineering team design a lighter car in a significantly reduced timescale. OptiStruct, Altair's optimisation tool, will be used by Gordon Murray Design in the future to help further refine primary structures. In the meantime, Radioss is being used to analyse the torsion stiffness, bending stiffness, frontal offset loading and normal mode characteristics of the vehicle.
‘The team needed the tests to be as close to reality as possible and achieved correlation within two per cent for the torsion and bending stiffness load cases. Less than five per cent is a good result, less than two per cent is excellent,’ said Simon Maher, senior stress and materials engineer responsible for CAE and test correlation at Gordon Murray Design.
