Increasing agility of the decision-making process by avoiding late design modifications

About the customer

INESPASA, an engineering company based in Spain, offers comprehensive solutions for turnkey projects in the aerospace and automotive sectors. With more than 35 years of experience in research and development (R&D) projects, tool design, manufacturing, precision machining and subassemblies, INESPASA has been working with major companies such as Airbus, Alestis, Boeing and Renault. The company’s vision is to provide innovative, state-of-the-art solutions and advanced technologies to key players in the aerospace and automotive industries and support them in their continual evolution. Today, INESPASA has two production plants in PE Aeropolis (Sevilla) and employs a highly qualified workforce of 150 people.

Their challenge

To be successful in a highly competitive market, aeronautical tooling companies such as INESPASA must deliver maximum quality for complex products and components, complying with highly demanding standards and regulations while meeting tight time constraints and limited budgets.

Time has become a major challenge for many of INESPASA’s projects focusing on the vertical integration of aerostructures, where adjustments are often required during the production of the first units, despite careful development. As developing and testing aircraft component prototypes is time-consuming and expensive, INESPASA had to find new and faster ways – such as multiphysics simulation – to evaluate its aerostructure designs, identify problems before they occur and ensure the viability of the implemented solutions.

Using Simcenter SimSolid within Siemens’ flexible license for structural simulation enabled the team to make fast decisions helping them to reduce the development time and improve their ROI.

Our solution

To achieve adequate stiffness values for the assembly instructions, the INESPASA team needed reliable results without resorting to the costly method of trial and error or time-consuming, repetitive finite element (FE) calculations. To evaluate the component designs, the INESPASA engineers considered various simulation tools and decided to utilize Siemens Digital Industries Software’s solutions, in particular the fast structural analysis tool, Simcenter™ Simsolid™ software. Simcenter is part of the Siemens Xcelerator business platform of software, hardware and services.

With Simcenter Simsolid, the engineers were able to simulate their aerostructure concepts quickly and virtually evaluate them. Later, the team applied Simcenter Inspire™ software for topology optimization and for multidisciplinary simulations and system level analyses. The engineers performed multiphysics structural calculations to estimate the stiffness of the aeronautical structural elements to obtain a deformation level. Leveraging Simcenter Simsolid allowed them to evaluate various solutions rapidly and efficiently and with a high degree of accuracy to achieve the most suitable design. Thanks to the topology optimization in Simcenter Inspire, the team was able to predict the behavior of the main component and achieve an optimal design. Initially, without any detailed information, the engineers were able to evaluate the level and the critical paths of the stresses.

Applying Simcenter Inspire for topology optimization INESPASA could predict and optimize the behavior of the principal component.

Results

Thanks to fast simulation results obtained with Siemens solutions, INESPASA addressed the challenge and found the solution with the best weight-stiffness ratio, providing an optimum usability of their aerostructure elements. Additionally, the engineers also improved the overall service conditions. Using the excellent computing capacities of Simcenter Simsolid enabled the company to increase the agility of their decision-making process by avoiding late design modifications and significantly reduced the development time while accelerating innovation. As a result, the component can be manufactured using conventional chip removal techniques. Finally, the flexibility of Siemens’ unique licensing system allowed the team to diversify its resources and extend the use of Siemens solutions beyond Simcenter Simsolid, significantly increasing the return-on-investment (ROI).

“The speed and accuracy of using Simcenter Simsolid and the efficiency of the Simcenter suite allowed us to develop the most complex aerostructure assemblies with confidence and faster than ever before, increasing ROI,” says Cristóbal León, head of R&D at INESPASA.

The stress and displacement results in Simcenter Simsolid are displayed as contour plots.