Case Study: HardMarque achieves a 23.5% lighter, equally strong titanium piston with Altair's Inspire and Evolve

HardMarque - Customer Case Study

HardMarque, a Melbourne-based digital design and manufacturing studio building “Future Factories” for on‑demand, additive-manufactured parts, set out to reimagine piston design to be significantly lighter yet just as strong for titanium 3D printing. To achieve this, HardMarque used Altair’s solidThinking suite—specifically solidThinking Inspire for concept generation and solidThinking Evolve for CAD refinement.

Using Altair’s tools, HardMarque benchmarked an existing piston in Evolve, created a design space, applied accurate loading scenarios in Inspire (with input from the solidThinking team and an experienced piston engineer) to generate an optimized organic topology, then refined the shape in Evolve for titanium additive manufacturing. The result was a final piston that weighed 289 g versus the original 378 g (a 23.5% weight reduction) while retaining strength, with easy export to AM equipment, faster workflow efficiency, and plans to further reduce weight to a 250 g target.

HardMarque

Nicholas Harman

Director