“If you force the packaging of your current optimized part you will not get the most out of Inspire. The idea is to start with the biggest possible packaging space you have,” said Bangal. “They used the same packaging space that the old part occupied as their starting point.

When they input their standard packaging space and loads, the customer was confused to find a similar design to the original part. “The most difficult part is thinking outside the box when designing a part with the tool.”įor example, Bangal told the story of a customer who designed an engine mount the same way for 10 years. “If the user uses CAD then Inspire is a cake walk,” joked Jaideep Bangal, Senior Application Engineer at solidThinking. That technology was put together with FEA solvers which essentially allowed you to figure out what the best structure is.” We took this high-end engineering technology, OptiStruct from Altair, and made it simple and easy to use for designers. “Inspire is based on human bone growth algorithms developed at the University of Michigan in the mid ‘80s,” said Kroeger. It will “grow” a near optimal concept using FEA simulations.

Instead of bringing simulation into the initial CAD design, Inspire works backwards. Inspire is an interesting example of early concept CAE design. Essentially, Inspire uses a bone growth algorithm to create the shape of a part from little more than loads, boundary conditions and a space that represents a maximum build volume. Take for instance the evolution of bones-long skeletal bones will grow and change shape as they are subjected to loads and boundary conditions.Īltair’s solidThinking has programmed this bone-like behaviour into Inspire, a concept modeling application for mechanical design.

The concept of a part taking shape as it reacts to its environment may be new to engineers, but nature has been doing this for a long time.

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