Case Study: National Composites Centre achieves a 15% lighter Sit-ski in under 3 months with Altair simulation-driven design

Composites Driving Innovation: Development of a Sit-Ski as an Advanced Technology Demonstrator

The National Composites Centre (NCC), a UK industrial-scale, open-access facility for advanced composite development, set out to build a Sit-ski technology demonstrator that would showcase system-level composite design, suspension kinematics and manufacturability. To support a simulation-driven approach, the NCC used Altair’s HyperWorks™ suite—including MotionSolve, HyperStudy, OptiStruct, HyperMesh, Inspire and Evolve—to model kinematics, materials and manufacturing before committing to hardware.

Altair delivered a fully virtual design and optimization workflow that allowed the cross‑Catapult team to assess performance and structural reliability prior to manufacture; the concept-to-assembly cycle took less than three months and produced a Sit-ski roughly 15% lighter than comparable devices. Physical testing validated the simulations, demonstrating good correlation with predicted spring and kinematic behavior, and confirming that Altair’s tools reduced development time, weight and risk while enabling faster design iteration.

National Composites Centre

Andrew Patterson

Engineering Capability Lead for Conceptual Design & DFX