Can Design Space Exploration Facilitate Risk Reduction While Finding Innovative Products, Faster?

Overview

Simulation can now be used as a tool that drives innovation within an organization. Rather than starting with a design and limiting innovation to preconceived ideas, intuition and/or past experience, companies can automate their simulation toolsets, in such a way as to discover better designs, faster.

HEEDS, offered in the Simcenter portfolio, is a powerful design space exploration software package that accelerates the engineering design process by automating analysis workflows (Process Automation), maximizing utilization of existing investments in computational hardware and software resources (Distributed Execution), efficiently exploring solutions (Efficient Search), and then assessing the performance to ensure real world goals are achieved (Insight & Discovery).

With most simulation software, the user defines an initial product design and uses simulation to predict how this and other similar design concepts will perform. With HEEDS, you first define a virtual prototype that has parameters which can be modified, using any number of internal or commercial simulation tools. Then, HEEDS automates the evaluation of multiple design variants and efficiently searches the available design space to find designs that meet or exceed performance targets. This process is called Design Space Exploration.

Multiple industrial cases are presented to showcase how it can help organizations innovate. One such study explores the design space of a desktop computer case, using HEEDS. The objective of the presented design challenge was to determine the optimal placement of the fans and vents as well as the number, size, shape, and material of the computer's heat sink, to minimize the mass while satisfying cooling requirements. In this presented case, two hundred design variants were automatically created, analyzed, and explored to find the best suitable design for this application, reducing the mass by 51% and improving the cooling performance by 25%.

With the help of HEEDS, innovative companies are extracting higher value from simulation by redefining their simulation strategy to focus on driving performance and discovering better designs, faster!