Case Study: Samsung R&D Institute—Bangalore achieves major stiffness gains and improved drop reliability with Altair OptiStruct

Samsung Research Institute – Bangalore Adopts Altair OptiStruct® for Optimizing Housing Design of a Smartphone

Samsung R&D Institute India - Bangalore (Samsung) needed to improve the drop reliability and structural stiffness of a typical smartphone front and rear housing while meeting tight design cycles and cost constraints. Traditional manual FEA iterations could not explore the full design space, so Samsung worked with Altair using HyperWorks OptiStruct® for topology and shape optimization to accelerate and broaden design exploration.

Altair applied OptiStruct® topology optimization to the rear housing and shape optimization to the front housing under quasi‑static 3‑point bend and torsion loads. The optimized rear design increased stiffness by 40% in bending and 74% in torsion and reduced PCB strain in drop simulation by 20%; the front design (1.6 g heavier) was 65% stiffer in bending and 85% stiffer in torsion (about 30% stiffer without the added weight) and cut display strain in drop simulation by 45%. The optimization runs took ~30 minutes versus ~7 hours for a single drop simulation, demonstrating clear, measurable reliability gains delivered by Altair.

Samsung

Gaurav Gupta

Senior Chief Engineer