Hoverboards are on fire!—Literally and figuratively. The hottest gift from this past holiday season has been plagued by frequent incidents of boards catching fire. They’ve been banned from public streets in New York City and throughout the United Kingdom. Most airlines are refusing to let them on board. No one will ever mistake today’s hoverboards for well- engineered products. However, it’s hard to ignore similarities between hoverboard and many other high-profile products that fail or malfunction—in the race to capture market share in a booming market.
Rapid advances in areas such as IoT, big data, and machine learning are driving the development of smart and connected products that incorporate more and more electronics and software into less and less space, increasing the chances of early product failures or malfunctions. Engineering teams are asked to meet ever-increasing and interdependent product requirements while reducing time-to-market. In order to push the design envelope while mitigating risk, engineers need to develop a deeper understanding of the product behavior under realistic operating conditions and quickly evaluate design trade-offs based on overall system behavior.
Dassault Systèmes aims to tackle this challenge thru the 3DEXPERIENCE platform by availing (a) 3D multiphysics technology simulate and gain insights into all aspects of product behavior (b) Design of Experiments (DOE) and Optimization to quickly unearth the best designs (c) Process Automation to improve workflow productivity and (d) data management to improve collaboration within and between teams.
CST, part of the SIMULIA brand, offers best-in-class technology for Computational Electromagnetism. Leveraging the capabilities offered through the CST Studio Suite®, Dassault Systèmes is exploring co-design methodology involving both 3D structural and electromagnetic domains. Co-design is a process that efficiently manages the design of interdependent product attributes that are often designed by different teams. Co-design is not a new concept. Hardware-Software co-design is popular in EDA for simultaneous design of both hardware and software.
Our goal is to establish a similar system for 3D product design by linking structural, thermal and electromagnetic design aspects of products. Increasing product complexity and interdependency of various requirements necessitates this approach. Co-design requires synchronizing design changes across different teams, enabling multi-disciplinary optimization and providing tighter integration between different physics and scales during simulation. Broadly speaking, we can classify structural-EM co-design into three different types. We shall illustrate the three classes using specific examples.
Concurrent Design of a Smart Wrist Band: A company wants to create a wearable device that fits comfortably on your wrist, counts the number of steps, provide seamless Bluetooth connectivity and is durable. The structural and RF designs are performed in parallel and DOE is used to modify the design to meet both wireless range and structural durability.
Ensure the forces generated on the wrist are not large enough to cause discomfort as the wristband slaps onto the hand.
Ensure the currents induced in the metal band do not affect the antenna performance significantly.
Perform multi-disciplinary DOE and optimization to ensure comfort, performance and reliability.
- Sequential Design of a Flex Cable: Flex cables are increasingly being used in compact electronics assemblies. We demonstrate sequential coupling between Structural and EM simulations to study the effects of mechanical deformation on electromagnetic aspects such as signal integrity and EMC.
Compute the mechanical deformation of flex cable using Abaqus and export it to CST Studio Suite.
Structural-EM co-design is just the start in our effort to help our users address the increasing complexity associated with designing tomorrow’s products. Our eventual goal is to expand the scope of co-design to include other aspects of product design such as thermal, acoustic etc. in order to provide engineering teams with an environment capable of fostering innovation while reducing the risk of product failures.
