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Altair Introduces Full-Vehicle NVH Simulation

TROY -- Altair Engineering Inc., a provider of simulation technology and engineering services, Wednesday announced the release of NVH Director, the first commercial software tool that makes full-vehicle noise-vibration-harshness simulation possible in the most advanced and streamlined form.

Altair will demonstrate NVH Director during a live Webinar held on Wednesday, Feb. 29 at 9 a.m. Eastern time. To register for the Webinar, visit www.altairhyperworks.com/NVHwebinar.

NVH Director employs Altair's HyperWorks suite of computer-aided engineering tools in a fully integrated, user-friendly, customizable form to automate the tasks involved in NVH analysis. By integrating the entire process of meshing, assembly, loadcase setup, and post-processing, it dramatically reduces the full-vehicle NVH simulation time, freeing CAE engineers to focus on optimizing product design and performance.

The solution introduces a new object-oriented environment for true full-vehicle NVH simulation. This environment enables users to manage subsystem representations, 3D display, FE entity ID numbering, connection properties and assembly definition in a modularized manner for ease of handling and debugging.

NVH Director includes highly specialized functionalities to simplify NVH simulation tasks, such as: * Meshing of the acoustic cavity and coarse display model * Subsystem model dynamics reduction to component mode synthesis superelement and frequency response function representations * Support for analysis using mixed FE and reduced representations * Templated lumped parameter models * Joints modeling using enhanced CBUSH elements * NVH local coordinate systems creation * Templated loadcase and guided, step-by-step, process-driven loadcase creation * Post-processing and diagnostics, with an integrated approach to visualizing results

"Traditionally, full-vehicle NVH simulation techniques have been proprietary processes, closely guarded by original-equipment manufacturers," said Anthony Norton, Altair's senior director, global automotive. "The time now has arrived for a comprehensive commercial product that combines all the most advanced features into one tool and that meets the changing needs of OEMs and the increasingly high expectations of consumers."

Altair's new product advances NVH analysis by facilitating the modeling of all vehicle subsystems, including trimbody, powertrain, suspension, steering system and torque paths. Furthermore, it operates based on real-world events, directly simulating customer usage experience to drive physical-prototype development and to identify problems related to specific loadcases and response.

"One of the biggest challenges in full-vehicle simulation is dealing with modeling complexity," said Jianmin Guan, Altair's senior program manager for noise, vibration, and harshness. "NVH Director reduces the complexity by giving users the ability to manage their assembly in a modular fashion and providing highly specialized tools that have never before been available in any commercial simulation packages. NVH Director simplifies full-vehicle simulation. It enables engineers to employ CAE to drive product design, with mathematical cause-effect relationships that generate a full understanding of physical root causes and with the ability to identify sensitive parameters through quick what-if studies. NVH Director clearly identifies the receiver of source-path vibrations, and the most effective solutions often come from reducing the source of vibrations. In the end, NVH Director significantly lessens physical testing by running many iterations in CAE simulation, and it improves the value of testing by helping the engineer learn more from simulation."

Registered Altair clients can download NVH Director from the Altair HyperWorks software downloads site using their existing HyperWorks units.

More at www.altairhyperworks.com.

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