Using flexible units licensing system to gain access to more than 150 Siemens and partner products

Seeking to reduce complexity

Dumarey, committed to continually enhancing their design processes and strengthening the capabilities of traditional finite element modelling (FEM), proactively explored faster but equally accurate simulation methods. Their challenge was the complexity of creating models and analysis, often taking several weeks, which risked costly iterations and time delays. Partnering with Siemens, Dumarey adopted Simcenter™ Simsolid™ software, a meshless structural analysis tool that streamlines modeling by eliminating geometry preparation and meshing. Simcenter is part of the Siemens Xcelerator business platform of software, hardware and services.

This solution allowed Dumarey to quickly analyze complex assemblies and explore multiple design variants. The impact was significant: development time was reduced by 75 percent, from four weeks to one. The units licensing system further supported Dumarey’s needs by offering flexible access to a broad suite of software tools, enhancing their engineering efficiency and maintaining a competitive advantage in a fast-paced market.

About the customer

Dumarey, formerly General Motors Global Propulsion Systems, is an engineering company with a portfolio ranging from internal combustion engine (ICE) development to micromobility via control units, kinetic energy recovery systems, transmissions and e-drives. Driven by its mission to revolutionize propulsion and control systems engineering, the company’s development team strives to achieve a faster, more efficient design and release process for prototypes that reduce lead time while improving quality. To accomplish this, Dumarey’s virtual engineering and noise, vibration and harshness (NVH) analysis team deploys Siemens’ best-in-class technology solutions to optimize their processes and perform development tasks from design simulation to validation.

Their challenge

It’s pivotal for the Dumarey team to be able to make informed design decisions early based on fast, accurate simulation results. These simulations help them avoid costly design iterations and critical time delays throughout the development process.

In the company’s standard development process, they start by creating a complex finite element model (FEM), mapping the components and relevant physics. Because of the complexity of these models and the fact that all boundary conditions and contact between parts must be considered, this creation is a lengthy process that can take up to several weeks. In addition, long compute times or solver convergence issues can cause costly delays. While the analysis response time could be shortened by simplifying models of complex assemblies, simplification can lead to unfavorable design decisions based on incomplete assumptions.

Since time is everything in today’s competitive landscape, Dumarey’s engineering team needed a comprehensive solution that could handle large, complex assemblies while providing timely, accurate results. Having previously collaborated on projects, the team chose Siemens to get the job done.

Left: Simcenter Simsolid enables Dumarey to speed the development of hydrogen technologies, allowing for fast model building and multiple design iterations. Right two: Using Simcenter Simsolid for structural analysis, Dumarey obtained accurate results much faster than what’s possible with traditional FEA approaches.

Our solution

Dumarey partnered with Siemens experts to accelerate their development process. The company benefitted from the flexible units licensing system, which gave them unlimited access to a wide range of Siemens applications, including its structural analysis tool, Simcenter Simsolid.

Although Dumarey often faced typical issues within their traditional FEM approach, Simcenter Simsolid offered the team a new approach: the power of meshless software. By eliminating geometry preparation and meshing – the team’s two most time-consuming and expertise-extensive tasks – Simcenter Simsolid empowered Dumarey’s engineers to build models and perform structural analyses on fully featured computer-aided design (CAD) assemblies within minutes. Simcenter Simsolid also allowed them to simplify contact generation and the setting of boundary conditions, further reducing their modeling time.

Results

Overall, Simcenter Simsolid empowered Dumarey to analyze complex parts and large assemblies at unprecedented speed, explore multiple design variants and obtain the accurate results they need to make informed design decisions. Using Simcenter Simsolid helped them streamline the model creation and analysis processes. Significantly, Dumarey slashed development time from four weeks to just one thanks to Siemens solutions, reducing their development time by 75 percent.

In addition to time savings, Dumarey benefitted from the possibility of using additional Siemens products via the units system. Units allow the company to access more than 150 Siemens and partner products and run software from any location and within any deployment method. “No other tool I know of compares to the speed and accuracy of Simcenter Simsolid for structural analysis,” says Mario Saracino, analysis technical leader, structural analysis, Dumarey. “Thanks to its lightning-quick design iterations, we can explore multiple alternatives in parallel with minimal additional effort. Now we can efficiently and accurately solve complex problems in a few days, compared to the weeks it would take with traditional methods. And better still, the tool is easy to learn and has a very intuitive interface.”

Simcenter Simsolid and the units licensing system helped Dumarey optimize their development process, allowing them to stay ahead of the competition in a global market where speed and accuracy are the ultimate keys to competitive advantage.