Case Study
eArtius helps compress Turbine Wheel design time
The Company
The Company is a unit of a Fortune 100 diversified technology and manufacturing corporation serving customers worldwide. It is in a Division which is recognized around the world as one of the leading manufacturers of engine boosting systems for passenger cars and commercial vehicles and is a global supplier to automotive manufacturers.
The Problem: Complex interaction among design elements
The company designs turbocharging products for the automotive industry. These products must deliver top performance and long life at a very competitive price. The basic principal behind turbocharging is fairly simple: air flowing into an engine is compressed in order to allow more air and fuel into the cylinder to increase the power output. However, a turbocharger is a very complex piece of machinery. Not only must the components within the turbocharger itself be precisely coordinated, but the turbocharger and the engine it services must also be exactly matched. If they're not, engine inefficiency and even damage can be the results.
To achieve these critical specifications, the product design process relies on a variety of technologies including optimization. Moreover, the optimization process must accommodate a large number of variables for each component to be truly useful in the turbocharger design.
The principle engineer for core technology was faced with this dilemma in the design of turbine and compressor wheels for the company's core products. Central to the turbocharger are the turbine and compressor wheels, which require mechanical optimization, to balance the turbocharger systems. Without top performing optimization software tools, the design process for these key components is dramatically impacted.
"We have to use an optimization product that can handle many variables - this particular design of a turbine had 45 variables," he stated. "With conventional products, that many variables would have been a tremendous barrier - slowing the design process down or requiring design changes to accomplish our goals."
The Solution: eArtius Pareto Explorer
The company turned to eArtius and its flagship product, eArtius Pareto Explorer to optimize the mechanical and airflow models simultaneously, something that they were not able to do with their previous optimization software.
"With eArtius Pareto Explorer, we were able to reduce design iterations because it could easily handle the number of variables we had in this design. That, in turn, saved us time, which is a crucial and expensive part of the design cycle. More importantly, we did not have to sacrifice product quality to achieve our results."
The Results: 50% decrease in design time and associated cost savings
"We were able to cut our average design time by 50 percent with eArtius Pareto Explorer," said the principal engineer. "Usually our process takes four to six weeks, with eArtius Pareto Explorer, we were able to cut that time in half to two or three weeks, which is a huge savings."
They estimate that the reductions in time delivered by eArtius Pareto Explorer could result in a cost savings of between $300,000 to $400,000 over several projects a year. In addition, eArtius Pareto Explorer has application outside of turbine and compressor wheels in the overall design of the turbocharger. "eArtius Pareto Explorer can be used for any design," said the principal engineer. "The algorithms are finely tuned to optimization, so it can be applied to any area to improve a design -- saving time and money."
eArtius is helping companies lower costs, increase efficiency and accelerate the design cycle through comprehensive optimization software and services, eArtius Pareto Explorer uses the company's patented technology to deliver breakthrough performance over existing optimization techniques. eArtius Pareto Explorer uses any type of complex multi-dimensional data needed to find the best solution from among a myriad of available alternatives.
With eArtius Pareto Explorer, this company is saving critical engineering design time and accelerating its product development cycle. Both have positive impact on the company's bottom line.