Case Study: Explotechnik saves time and costs with SimScale

Explotechnik saved time, physical resources, and costs using SimScale to evaluate their piston design

Explotechnik, a small engineering firm, needed a better way to evaluate a high-velocity piston design that strikes hardened steel to generate a shockwave. Before using SimScale’s cloud-based CAE/FEA platform, the team struggled to model nonlinear material behavior at specific temperatures, which led to plastic deformation in long-term testing and forced repeated design iterations.

Using SimScale, Explotechnik ran about 10 finite element simulations in parallel from a web browser, including dynamic analyses with contact, friction, and nonlinear hyper-elastic materials. The results helped validate the piston design against real-world testing, cut 1–2 weeks of experimentation, and reduce the need for physical prototypes and related costs; SimScale also enabled faster development with around 200 core hours and 200 minutes per simulation run batch.

Explotechnik

Reto Steiner

Research and Development Engineer