Case Study: Ford Motor Company achieves lightweight, reliable 3D-printed vehicle components with Altair Inspire

Ford Motor Company - Customer Case Study

Ford Motor Company, a Fortune 50 automaker with global engineering centers, needed to scale additive manufacturing (AM) for vehicle components but faced limited AM expertise and risks such as structural failures, support detachment, and poor surface finish when printer parameters were chosen incorrectly. To tackle this, Ford partnered with Altair and applied Altair® Inspire™ and Altair® HyperStudy® to bring 3D-printing simulation and design-of-experiments into its development process.

Altair used Inspire’s 3D printing simulation plus HyperStudy-driven DoE (using Renishaw AM500Q parameter ranges) to optimize bracket geometries and printer settings, monitoring outputs like Maximum Displacement and Maximum Temperature. The work helped Ford identify optimal process parameters before production, solve support and finish issues, and produced good A-to-B correlations between FEA and physical testing—delivering measurable simulation-to-test agreement, improved first-time quality, and reduced risk of manufacturing failures.

Ford Motor Company

José Cazares

PT Cooling CAE Engineer