Case Study: AGCO Corporation cuts development time and ensures robust equipment design with ANSYS

ANSYS helps AGCO to reduce development times and maintain global leadership

AGCO Corporation, a leading global manufacturer of tractors and agricultural equipment, needed to ensure its machines endure extreme operating and misuse conditions while also cutting development time and cost. To evaluate complex load cases across large, detailed assemblies with hundreds of pretension bolts, nonlinear contacts and very large meshes, AGCO adopted ANSYS simulation tools (ANSYS Professional NLS and ANSYS Workbench) to make simulation a standard part of the design process.

Using ANSYS, AGCO implemented bidirectional CAD transfer, automatic contact and mesh generation, and intuitive bolt pretension definition to speed model preparation and solver setup. ANSYS Workbench handled a representative model with 26 nonlinear contact regions, ~10 million degrees of freedom and 146 pretension bolts; bolt issues were resolved and simulation results showed near-perfect agreement with test data for forces, contact sliding and structural stresses, helping AGCO reduce development time and maintain global leadership.

AGCO Corporation

Eberhard Würtele

Stress Engineer