Rail

    The world’s major rail vehicle manufactures trust Altair ProductDesign to keep their business on track. We have worked on High Speed, EMUs, DMUs, Metro and Underground, and have assessed car bodies, bogies, engines, brakes, suspensions and more.

  • Proof, Abuse, Fatigue & NVH Assessments:
    Structural requirements for rail vehicles in accordance with railway group standard. Development of repair catalogues to input into maintenance schedules.

  • Structure Optimization:Learn More (PDF)
    Industry leaders, with over a decade of expertise in applying optimization to rail structures (e.g. wheel box, coupling frames, obstacle deflector etc) to achieve optimum weight whilst maintaining structural performance.

  • Crashworthiness Assessment of Structural Design:
    Ensuring Required Levels of Crash Performance for all major impact scenarios (e.g. Level crossing, ‘Like to Like’, Impact with locomotive etc).

  • Crashworthiness Assessment of Interior Layout:
    Ensuring injury criteria levels are not exceeded for seated and standing unrestrained occupants (e.g. head impact onto grab pole, car-body saloon partitions).

  • Advanced Model Building & Assembly:
    Using automotive technology (e.g. batch meshing, spot weld / fastener creation) to automatically create high fidelity or rapid concept models of carbody structures.

  • Optimization Center:Learn More (PDF)
    Altair has set-up ‘Skill Centers of Excellence’ to focus on weight reduction whilst maintaining performance.

    Rail case studies
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  • Tactical Wheeled Vehicles

    Altair ProductDesign is a product development partner to many of the world’s military vehicle manufacturers, providing support from facilities across the Americas, Europe and Asia. We work with our customers to create early concepts, develop robust designs, provide virtual and physical verification, and refine their vehicles for production. Our cross-functional team has broad experience, from high-volume production programs to niche vehicle creation, from lightweight off-road utility vehicles to heavy trucks. The Altair ProductDesign approach includes an aggressive application of technology and automation, with a focus on weight efficiency. The result is a development process with reduced risk and shorter cycle times, delivering a product that meets functional attribute and mass targets, on time.

    Improving Payload & Performance

    Altair ProductDesign leverages advanced design optimization technology and methods to dramatically improve vehicle payload and performance through weight reduction without compromising vehicle durability or protection. Our approach, leveraging Altair’s industry leading optimization technology OptiStruct, has been successfully applied to common and high performance material types – including composites, steels, aluminum and magnesium – and across multiple industries. One of our most effective and cost-efficient delivery models to reduce product weight and cost is through the establishment of co-located Optimization Centers. Altair Optimization Centers, jointly staffed by Altair ProductDesign and client team members, are high impact environments for technology transfer and implemetation of weight-driven product development strategies for vehicle architectures to individual components.

    Enhancing Mobility

    Altair ProductDesign has worked with many passenger car, commercial vehicle and military OEMs to define, design, simulate and refine their ground vehicle products. Our approach spans from target setting to sign-off, with a non-departmentalized team applying the latest CAE methods, subjective evaluation and objective testing. Project experience includes OEM design and release responsibility, benchmarking, loads simulation & analysis, shock tuning, kinematics and compliance testing and simulation, prototype build and full-vehicle MBD modeling.

    Advancing Survivability — Blast, Crash and Rollover

    Altair ProductDesign brings broad industry experience of all aspects of occupant protection from explosions and fragmentation to collision impact and rollover. Altair has been working with automotive OEMs and their suppliers worldwide for more than twenty years to improve designs, decrease time to market and reduce testing by simulating occupant and vehicle safety performance in compliance with Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards and local requirements. ProductDesign continues to develop new methods to accelerate the vehicle design process including the Moving Boundary Crash and the Hull Optimization for Occupant Protection (HOOP) methodologies. Both integrate the sophisticated non-linear CAE analysis methods and structural optimization techniques to develop weight efficient vehicle structures for improved energy mitigation and warfighter protection.

    Complete Program Partner

    Altair ProductDesign provides program support from concept to launch. For more than two decades, Altair ProductDesign has consulted with vehicle manufacturers around the world, from immersive design research through plant manufacturing support, to bring their products to market faster. As a full program partner, we have a strong history in successfully combining technology with subjective evaluation, objective benchmarking, industrial design, design studies, target setting, and vehicle design and release activities.