Case Study: Progress‑Werk Oberkirch (PWO) achieves faster, lower‑cost development and optimized cross‑car beam design with Altair HyperWorks

HyperWorks Improves Development Processes in Automotive Industry

PWO (Progress-Werk Oberkirch AG) faced the challenge of developing a new steel cross car beam that met conflicting automotive requirements—modal/eigenfrequency limits for comfort plus stringent crash and safety specs—while staying timely and cost effective. To tackle this, PWO used the HyperWorks Suite from Altair, receiving CAD and specification data and needing a single CAE environment to cover modeling, simulation, optimization and forming validation.

Using Altair’s HyperWorks Suite, PWO converted CAD to FE models with HyperMesh, ran analyses with RADIOSS and other solvers, optimized with OptiStruct, post-processed in HyperView and validated forming with HyperForm. The Altair solution enabled simulation-driven development that reduced physical prototypes, shortened the development cycle, supported more design variants, produced material savings through optimization, and showed very good correlation between simulation and physical tests—improving quality, robustness and return on software investment.

PWO

Michael Welle

Product/Process, Numerical Simulatioon