GM (General Motors) is one of the world’s top four automotive manufacturers. With a portfolio of brands that includes household names such as Buick, Cadillac, and Chevrolet, the company produces millions of vehicles a year in plants across the Americas, Asia, and Europe.

There has been an increasing need for GM design teams to develop their technical abilities to perform structural analysis and be able to evaluate their own designs. The simulation (Altair competitor) software initially utilized by designers proved problematic, and GM was keen to investigate a new approach. Altair SimSolid provided them with an alternative which not only dramatically decreased preprocessing time, it also allowed designers to evaluate complex components and complete ensembles which was not possible with the previously used software.

For modal analysis at the component level, a correlation factor of 97% was found with SimSolid, compared to the center’s existing solver. With SimSolid, this was combined with a 75% reduction in time taken to complete the analysis. Of that saving, 81% is accounted for by pre-processing, the rest for generating the solution.

Read the entire case study in Croatian language in the IRT 3000 magazine.