Case Study: Dana Incorporated achieves 25% part weight reduction and same-day design with ANSYS Mechanical

Dana Incorporated - Customer Case Study

Dana Incorporated, a leading global supplier of automotive parts, faced the challenge of reducing weight on heavy-truck suspension components—such as an upper control arm—without compromising strength or stiffness, while meeting tight budgets and product-launch schedules. To address this, Dana partnered with ANSYS and used ANSYS Mechanical’s topology-optimization capabilities to drive a more efficient, insight-driven design process.

Using ANSYS Mechanical, Dana’s engineers derived loads from multibody simulation, created an envelope model, meshed it, and applied ANSYS topology optimization to remove low-stiffness elements and reveal a minimal-material geometry. The approach produced a 25% weight reduction for the upper control arm, cut the optimization cycle to less than a day (versus weeks of prototype iteration), and has been standardized across Dana’s commercial-vehicle designs.

Dana Incorporated

Caner Demirdogen

Senior Principal Engineer