Some news about electric vehicle (EV) design from Hexagon.
Hexagon’s Manufacturing Intelligence division and JSOL Corporation have entered a strategic partnership to accelerate the virtual prototyping of electrified powertrains through multi-physics simulation. The collaboration builds on a long-term technical alliance offering global customers accurate and high-productivity virtual prototyping of. complex electro-mechanical systems
The new strategic partnership will enable customers to combine Hexagon’s extensive engineering simulation software suite with JSOL Corporation’s JMAG electromagnetic field analysis software to solve a full spectrum of system design problems in the virtual world more quickly, thoroughly, and cost effectively than physical prototyping allows.
Mahesh Kailasam, general manager of design and engineering at Hexagon’s Manufacturing Intelligence division, said: “As the move towards electrification accelerates, new challenges need to be addressed to improve vehicle performance characteristics, from the component to system level. For example, improvements to noise, vibration, and harshness (NVH) performance now require simulation solutions to provide answers at much higher frequency ranges. Our partnership with JSOL solidifies our commitment to serve our existing and new customers in this rapidly evolving market.”
Takashi Yamada, chief technology officer at JMAG Business Company, said, “We are excited to work with Hexagon in this electrification journey. This partnership will now allow us to expedite electric vehicle NVH solution development between JMAG and Hexagon’s flagship products MSC Nastran and Adams, along with Romax and Actran.”
To stay ahead in the market, electromagnetic powertrains need to be very efficient and light, using new designs, materials, and manufacturing techniques. Hexagon and JSOL offer digital platforms and virtual environments for engineers to develop advanced electric powertrain technologies.
The partnership will advance several key areas to enhance their product design strategies for electric vehicles and enable more efficient and harmonious product development. A primary focus is to address NVH, enabling engineers to improve product comfort and reduce noise through innovative simulation-based design adjustments. Furthermore, by developing advanced simulations, the new solutions will inform robust and durable designs and make refinements to finalize products within space constraints. Another significant focus for the two companies is helping customers tackle the complexities of modern electro-mechanical machines, controls, and gearboxes with integrated solutions that foster collaboration between engineers from different disciplines.
Powersys, a global provider of design and engineering solutions for electrical vehicles and grid applications, will apply its expertise to help customers accelerate the implementation of these solutions. Olivier Toury, founder and president, Powersys, commented: “We are excited to build on our work with JMAG to offer our customers eNVH and virtual prototyping solutions with Hexagon’s portfolio. Using trusted simulations from Romax, Adams, Actran, or MSC Nastran with JMAG is helping customers make real progress towards zero prototyping for electric vehicles and we are getting busy with U.S. customers already.”
Hexagon provides extensive NVH computer-aided engineering (CAE) support from concept to final system validation and review through its Elements software for system modelling, Romax powertrain simulation, Actran acoustic simulation, Cradle CFD (computational fluid dynamics) air-structure simulation, ODYSEE AI (artificial intelligence) and optimisation platform, and physical simulation partnership with VI-GRADE.
The most noticeable trend at least from my perspective for 2023 concerns everyone doing surveys and issuing press releases. I guess you can do new products or applications, or you can do a survey. I took a grad school class on doing surveys. Then I became a (ahem) journalist and discovered what passes for surveys in journalism bears only a faint resemblance to what I learned in social science.
Be that as it may, Molex commissioned Dimensional Research to survey more than 750 qualified global participants with direct or managerial responsibility for hardware design or system architecture. The results should not surprise anyone. In brief:
More than half of the survey participants assert that reliability drives brand loyalty
Top reliability challenges include adequate time for testing, supplier quality, cost and correlation of product design attributes to their impact on reliability
46% of respondents believe AI, ML, simulations and analytics are best bets to boost product reliability
92% expect to lose reliability experts to retirement over the next five years
91% of the survey participants reported a strong correlation between their ability to deliver reliable products with having trusted, proven supplier relationships. To that end, 96% of the respondents have changed part suppliers due to reliability issues, with more than a quarter reporting frequent changes. Overall, these supplier relationships are becoming increasingly critical, as evidenced by 74% of respondents who believe reliability is at risk due to shortening design cycles.
Human-centered design. Designing products as if humans were going to use them. Designing human-machine interface in ways that make it easier to see what’s going on.
It was 2009 and again in 2010. Emerson Global Users Exchange. Emerson Process Marketing Director Bill Morrison grabbed me (figuratively) to show and explain how Emerson was working with a university using Human-Centered Design for its products. And the benefits.
Emerson has talked to me more about HCD over the ensuing years than any other company. But I think many are adopting at least a little of the concept.
Today I listened to a recent Guy Kawasaki Remarkable People podcast interview with Don Norman. He called the episode Putting the User Back in User Interface. The wide-ranging interview, including time that both spent at Apple, took a dive into “Humanity-Centered Design”. This includes ideas from the Circular Economy where we design not just for the immediate use but also for life after the useful life of the product.
This is the Remarkable People podcast. We’re on a mission to make you remarkable. Today, we’ll discuss the life and work of Don Norman, professor and the founding director of the Design Lab at the University of California of San Diego.
He has a diverse range of history, including a university professor, Apple executive, company advisor, author, speaker, and curmudgeon; Don has contributed to many fields, including electrical engineering, psychology, computer science, cognitive science, and design.
And for a time, he was my boss at Apple when I was an Apple fellow. I’m surprised he doesn’t introduce himself that way.
Welcome to Remarkable People. We’re on a mission to make you remarkable. Helping me in this episode is one of my idol’s, Carol Dweck,
Her book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, is one of two most important influences in my life.
Carol is a professor of psychology at Stanford University.Her work spans developmental psychology, social psychology, and personality psychology, focusing on self-conceptions and their impact on behavior, motivation, achievement, and interpersonal dynamics.
I hear that the Rockwell Automation investment in PTC has not brought all the desired benefits—although they did short-cut some software development with ThingWorx. The real pay-off came with the acquisitions of Plex and FiiX for cloud development. Further to the cloud story, this release details extension of cloud to its design software (think control system design, not CAD).
FactoryTalk Design Studio, a new cloud-based software product, leverages modern software development practices and an integrated version control system. Teams can collaborate more easily with automated tools to share and merge changes and project sizes can scale dynamically with support for multiple controllers in a single project.
FactoryTalk Design Studio is one of the five core solutions in FactoryTalk Design Hub. Industrial organizations can now transform their automation design capabilities with a more simplified, productive way to work powered by the cloud.
Siemens made a splash at Hannover with several announcements. Some I listed last week. This one is AI and Chatbot. Another one was made by the software group. I am working on that one. Had a number of questions on it.
This news highlights further enhancement of Siemens’ long-standing relationship with Microsoft. In brief:
Siemens’ new Teamcenter app for Microsoft Teams to use AI, boosting productivity and innovation throughout a product lifecycle
Azure OpenAI Service powered assistant can augment the creation, optimization and debugging of code in software for factory automation
Industrial AI to enable visual quality inspection on the shop floor
Using AI to power software development is something Apple developers hope to see next month in a release of Xcode. They say that this will be a powerful tool to enhance programming.
Siemens and Microsoft are integrating Siemens’ Teamcenter software for product lifecycle management (PLM) with Microsoft’s collaboration platform Teams and the language models in Azure OpenAI Service as well as other Azure AI capabilities.
“The integration of AI into technology platforms will profoundly change how we work and how every business operates,” said Scott Guthrie, executive vice president, Cloud + AI, Microsoft. “With Siemens, we are bringing the power of AI to more industrial organizations, enabling them to simplify workflows, overcome silos and collaborate in more inclusive ways to accelerate customer-centric innovation.”
For example, service engineers or production operatives can use mobile devices to document and report product design or quality concerns using natural speech. Through Azure OpenAI Service, the app can parse that informal speech data, automatically creating a summarized report and routing it within Teamcenter to the appropriate design, engineering or manufacturing expert. To foster inclusion, workers can record their observations in their preferred languages which is then translated into the official company language with Microsoft Azure AI. Microsoft Teams provides user-friendly features like push notifications to simplify workflow approvals, reduce the time it takes to request design changes and speed up innovation cycles.
Siemens and Microsoft are also collaborating to help software developers and automation engineers accelerate the code generation for Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC), the industrial computers that control most machines across the world’s factories. At Hannover Messe, the companies are demonstrating a concept for how OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other Azure AI services can augment Siemens’ industrial automation engineering solutions. The showcase will highlight how engineering teams can significantly reduce time and the probability of errors by generating PLC code through natural language inputs. These capabilities can also enable maintenance teams to identify errors and generate step-by-step solutions more quickly.
We keep returning to the theme of the importance of product data. This report from NI summarizing recent research into using product-centric data, such as test data, in product development brings forth some data on data.
Hundreds of senior product innovators say that product data is key to staying competitive, yet more than half of the respondents recognize gaps in the way they extract value from their test data. There is also a strong correlation between advanced data strategies and increased degrees of innovation, with two-thirds of respondents believing that a data strategy is essential to optimizing the product lifecycle.
“Companies face a dual challenge of increased product complexity and shrinking time to market, causing a shift in the way products are developed. They recognize that the status quo will not work anymore,” says Mike Santori, fellow at NI. “Business performance can improve through connected product data and analytics, and this research provides evidence that test data are a strategic differentiator.”
While many of the engineering vice presidents and heads of R&D recognize the value of data in their product development, over half cited cost as the inhibiting factor preventing the transformation of their production models. The research also pointed to test being an underutilized resource with 38% of respondents saying they rarely use test to inform product design and 51% recognizing that they could extract more value from their data if they implemented test earlier in their processes.
Additional findings include:
52% of companies with an integrated company-wide product data strategy experienced faster time-to-market in the last 12 months, compared to 33% of companies without this advantage
55% of product innovators say that integrating test data into the product development process will be a key priority over the next 12 months
40% identify integrating test data into the product development process among the initiatives that could bring the most value to their business
The survey was conducted among senior product innovators in 10 industries including semiconductor, transportation, consumer electronics, and aerospace and defense. It was produced by FT Longitude, the specialist research and content marketing division of the Financial Times Group.
