Promoted Content: Advancing automotive product development with simulation apps

Product development is a time-sensitive process and automotive companies like Mahindra & Mahindra Limited (M&M), a multinational original equipment manufacturer (OEM) in the automotive industry in India, are constantly on the lookout for innovative approaches to shorten the product development life cycle and gain an advantage over their competitors. Simulation plays a crucial role in this endeavour by reducing the dependence on prototyping, which in turn reduces the time to market for any product.

However, even after incorporating simulation, product design can take up a lot of time. Designers require new concepts to be evaluated quickly, which may not be possible because of the required complexity of the analysis. After the design is evaluated by the CAE team, the design team then modifies the design based on the CAE results and again waits for validation by the CAE experts. These iterations continue until a final design is obtained.

As a result, the design lead time can run into a couple of months for some vehicle components, depending upon the number of iterations required for design finalisation. Moreover, the time-intensive CAE analysis between design iterations leaves the CAE experts juggling between intermediate design evaluations across several departments of an organisation.