Altair, LG Slash Smartphone Drop-Test Simulation Time From Weeks To Under A Day

TROY (WWJ) -- The Troy engineering and software provider Altair announced an achievement in the electronics industry Wednesday that is expected to accelerate the development of new smartphones, tablets, home appliances and other consumer electronics while enabling engineers to create a wider range of durable designs.

Working together, Altair and Korea's LG Electronics have successfully created a seamlessly integrated drop-test simulation automation system which enables LGE engineers to conduct smartphone drop-test simulations within 24 hours -- a crucial procedure that normally requires one to two weeks for companies across the smartphone industry.

Employing Altair's HyperWorks suite of computer-aided engineering tools -- including HyperMesh for pre-processing, the RADIOSS solver, the HyperView post-processor, and its embedded automation framework -- the Altair-LGE team automated many of the time-consuming manual tasks associated with FEA modeling, analysis set up and post-processing to carry out the drop-test simulation.

"Altair and LGE's collaboration on this drop-test simulation automation system helps LGE to be even more competitive and bring a greater variety of robust products to market faster," said Molly Heskitt, Altair's senior director of global electronics and consumer goods. "This automation system addresses major challenges of the electronics industry: time to market, innovation and cost. It shortens product development time, lowers development and warranty cost and leaves more time for design, all resulting in a better phone."

Altair officials said LG engineers can use the time freed up by the drop-test simulation automation system to explore more iterations of the device's design to develop a more robust and innovative version. LG has adopted the drop-test simulation automation system for ongoing smartphone designs and plans to use it on its all future smartphones, also employing Altair's OptiStruct tool to optimize the designs of the phones for cost and reliability.

With the ability to access and test more impact scenarios quickly, LG expects its warranty costs to be reduced, since its optimized smartphones will be more resistant to damage from dropping.

"One of the biggest challenges to the smartphone industry is time to market, and many companies do not have enough time in the highly competitive product development cycle to consider as many designs as they would like to," said Y.H. Lee, research fellow at LG. "The standard 7 to 14 days for drop-test simulation is too long. With Altair we are now able to slice the time required for drop-test simulation from a week to just hours."

Altair anticipates that this automated drop-test simulation process can produce similar results for the design of other types of consumer electronics.

More at www.altair.com.