Designing comfort, safety and economy

About the customer

Mirus Aircraft Seating (Mirus) is a leading global manufacturer of innovative, high-performance aircraft seating, with operations in the U.K., Malaysia and China. The company unites technology, expertise and best practices from the automotive and aerospace sectors, focusing on form, function, innovation and sustainability to deliver the best possible passenger experience and save airline operators money.

Mirus was one of the first manufacturers to bring lightweight aircraft seats to market, and its MTEST on-site dynamic testing facility – the largest commercially available test facility in the U.K. – features the latest dynamic testing technology.

Their challenge

Once Mirus started working with Siemens they also began collaborating with their experts to develop models, methods and processes to use and reuse when developing their range of aircraft seating products, taking into consideration complex factors, including material composition, weight, durability, production cost, long-term efficiency and above all passenger safety. In 2022 it added a Humanetics crash dummy model to fully emulate physical crash tests. Advanced modeling and simulation are critical to Mirus’ business and its mission of delivering innovative, high-performance aircraft seating solutions while enhancing the passenger experience. It requires powerful computing resources to perform preprocessing, data analysis, postprocessing, validation and more.

Our solution

To power advanced crash testing simulation, the Mirus team expanded its computing capabilities to the cloud by employing the Simcenter™ Unlimited™ Virtual Appliance software, which is part of the Siemens Xcelerator business platform of software, hardware and services. Simcenter Unlimited is a turnkey, state-of-the-art private appliance, available in both on-premises and cloud-based formats. Simcenter Unlimited delivers unlimited use
of a wide range of Siemens Simcenter software to simulate mechanics, fluids, electromagnetics, etc., including modeling, visualization and optimization. High-performance computing resource management is included in every system, providing efficient scheduling, monitoring and resource allocation. With a user-friendly web portal, it allows users to easily submit jobs and manage workloads.

Just months after Mirus launched the Simcenter Unlimited Virtual Appliance, the company further boosted its computing power by bringing computing in-house with an Simcenter Unlimited physical appliance, putting high-spec hardware on-site at their U.K. facility and enabling team members to compute as much as they liked without the worry of cost overruns.

“With Simcenter Unlimited we get everything in one easy package,” says Adam Challenor, technical director at Mirus. “Our engineers are productive, and our IT team has all the administrative, workload management and analysis tools they need to keep things running smoothly.”

Mirus’s MTEST on-site dynamic testing facility is the largest commercially available dynamic sled test facility in the U.K.

Results

Two years later Mirus was using the Simcenter Unlimited appliance 24/7. Over time, it needed to boost capacity and run applications even faster, so in 2025 Siemens installed extra hardware nodes to make the physical appliance more than twice as fast. Mirus is still growing and faces an ever-greater need for efficient computing solutions to enable simulation-driven design, artificial intelligence (AI) powered engineering, fatigue and durability testing, materials management, etc. Mirus and Siemens continue to work together to make the most of its mission-critical computing resources. “Siemens solutions help us reduce time-to-market and be a leader in a competitive field,” says Challenor.