Case Study: American Railcar Industries achieves faster design modifications and cost savings with Altair's HyperWorks

Railcar Manufacturer Speeds Design Modifications with HyperWorks

American Railcar Industries, a St. Charles, Mo. railcar manufacturer, needed a faster, more flexible way to modify designs to meet cargo-specific requirements while minimizing weight and cost. The company faced slow, tedious re-meshing and limited ability to explore multiple design options, so it adopted Altair’s HyperWorks suite—notably HyperMesh—for pre-processing and later used MotionSolve and is evaluating HyperCrash for dynamic studies.

Altair’s HyperWorks/HyperMesh enabled quick mesh updates without deleting and re-meshing, improved graphics and model manipulation, and let engineers run structural dynamics and mechanism analyses in-house rather than contracting them out. As a result, American Railcar can pursue many more design iterations (e.g., moving from just a few options to testing 15+ iterations), realize huge time savings that translate into dollar savings, and validate more robust, cost-efficient railcar designs.

American Railcar Industries

Spencer Ashie-Winns

Structural Engineering Manager