Explore Manufacturing Simulation
Learn how KETIV brings simulation consulting, strategies, and tools to streamline product development and testing across your manufacturing operations.
KETIV + Ansys
Build with Certainty
KETIV partners with Ansys, a company with manufacturing process simulation baked into their DNA. They have the broadest, deepest, and most powerful portfolio of simulation solutions and over 50 years at the forefront of the manufacturing industry.
With KETIV’s expertise as an Elite Channel Partner supporting Ansys’s open and flexible architecture, you can integrate Ansys technologies into your existing enterprise environment and experience a rapid return on investment.
Let us help you streamline your manufacturing process and eliminate production uncertainty.
Real, Measurable Results
- Fewer physical prototypes
- Streamlined design iterations and change orders
- Less scrap, material loss, and rework in the production process
- Reduced design cycle time
- Decreased direct product cost
- Less time spent rectifying production failures
- Enhanced workforce proficiency
- Increased throughput on the production line
- Lower-cost verification and validation
- Quicker response to RFPs
- More engineering time spent on innovation
- Boosted CSAT score
Simulation Success Story
LaunchPoint Steps Into the Future of Aerospace
LaunchPoint is an aerospace propulsion company. With the help of Ansys simulation software and KETIV, they’re transitioning from an R&D group to a full manufacturing company. Manufacturing simulation helps them quickly create, iterate, and validate designs while reducing cost and risk.
Ansys Simulation Training & Events
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What is Simulation?
What Can Manufacturing Simulation Do?
Simulation refers to the use of computer simulation models and algorithms to predict a product’s behavior under various conditions. Affordable and easy-to-use, manufacturing process simulation software reduces or eliminates the need for physical prototypes and time-consuming testing, enabling design engineers to launch better products faster.
Simulation Use Cases Are Endless
Simulation can be used in many different industries, including aerospace, automotive, industrial equipment, high-tech, and more. It can also optimize a wide range of product characteristics, including strength, durability, efficiency, and cost.
Sustainable Products and A Better World
By bringing engineering and manufacturing solutions to life in a virtual setting, design engineers can make crucial safety decisions before accidents occur. They can design superior products that are environmentally sustainable and solve problems they didn’t even know existed.
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We are here and ready to help get you the right simulation solution to drive innovation at your business.
Mason Johnson
Simulation: The Future of Manufacturing is Now
Simulation tools are highly adaptable, allowing for a wide range of analyses to be conducted across your manufacturing operations. Together, they deliver essential benefits such as improved product safety, fewer mechanical failures, higher product quality, reduced costs, and enhanced sustainability.
1. Improved Product Safety
Simulation prevents products from deforming or collapsing in such a way that causes harm or even death. Thorough testing enables manufacturers to provide clear safety guidelines, protecting users from injury and their employers from legal action.
2. Fewer Mechanical Failures
Simulation weeds out mechanical problems before they occur, ensuring poorly designed products never make it into production. This preemptive action conserves valuable time and resources and minimizes the likelihood of costly product recalls.
3. Higher Product Quality
Simulation enables rapid iteration. Faster design cycles lead to higher quality, more innovative, longer-lasting products that provide superior customer satisfaction and can be sold for a higher margin.
4. Reduced Cost
Simulation reduces and sometimes eliminates the need for prototypes and physical tests, saving time and money. Engineers and designers can optimize their designs before diving into actual production, helping them avoid expensive changes that could arise later.
5. Improved Sustainability
Simulation software reduces the need for physical prototypes and testing, which helps reduce waste and carbon emissions. It also improves product quality and durability, lowering the environmental impact of production and disposal.
Do it all with multi-physics simulation.
Key Simulations in Manufacturing and Product Design
There is a wide array off simulations used in manufacturing and product design. Let’s review a high-level list:
Mechanical Simulation
Mechanical simulation is a powerful tool that forecasts the effects of diverse loading conditions on products and production systems. Today, this process is chiefly executed through advanced finite element analysis software, which streamlines the mathematical workload for engineers. Consequently, engineers can tackle more complex challenges that transcend the boundaries of manual calculations.
What Is Finite Element Analysis (FEA)?
FEA originated as a method of stress analysis in the design of aircraft. Today it’s used across various industries, from civil engineering (for analyzing things like beams, plates, and foundations) to ship-building, motor, and engine design.
FEA predicts what will happen to a product under a range of conditions, providing valuable insights for design optimization. It does so by breaking a physical object down mathematically into thousands of tiny elements and using algebraic formulations to calculate how each one will respond. By synthesizing the behavior of these interconnected elements, a comprehensive perspective emerges, revealing the overall impact of physical forces on product behavior.
Diverse Approaches to Mechanical Simulation
There are many different ways to tackle mechanical simulation, each aimed at handling particular engineering issues and goals. These approaches include stress, thermal, impact, and durability analyses.
Stress Analysis
Stress analysis predicts how a component or assembly could fail under loading conditions, such as bending, tension, compression, shear, and torsion. It considers factors such as geometry, material properties, and boundary conditions set by the engineer.
There are two main types of stress analysis: static and dynamic. A static load changes slowly, while a dynamic load happens fast. Dynamic loads, which include the movement of people, wind, waves, traffic, snow, earthquakes, and blasts, are less predictable and, therefore, require more complex simulations.
Thermal Analysis
Thermal analysis predicts how the physical and chemical properties of components, products, or systems will behave when subject to changes in temperature. The results determine the thermal stability of materials, thermal expansion, and their ability to conduct heat.
Thermal analysis is an umbrella term covering multiple methods and techniques, including:
- Differential Thermal Analysis (DTA): The measurement of temperature differences between a sample and reference material when subjected to different temperatures.
- Differential Scanning Calorimetry (DSC): The determination of heat flow differences between a sample and reference material when subjected to different temperatures.
- Thermogravimetric Analysis (TGA): The analysis of mass changes in a material when subjected to different temperatures.
- Thermal Mechanical Analysis (TMA): The analysis of dimensional changes in a material, such as expansion or contraction, when subjected to different temperatures.
Impact Analysis
Impact analysis forecasts the response of a material or structure to an impact or collision event. It is widely employed by automakers when evaluating the crash-worthiness of new car models.
Engineers in the automotive industry need to understand the energy thresholds cars can endure before experiencing plastic deformation. Additionally, they need to ensure these vehicles meet stringent legal safety regulations. While physical tests can be costly and limited in scope, computer simulations offer a comprehensive and precise alternative for assessing impact resistance.
Durability Analysis
Durability analysis predicts when a component or structure will fail due to fatigue. The ultimate goal is to ensure that products can withstand the rigors of daily use and have a longer service life, improving customer satisfaction.
This sophisticated technology is extensively employed in the design and development of automobiles, aircraft, and heavy machinery, where the integrity of crucial elements such as spot welds and long-lasting seam welds is imperative to prevent fatigue-induced failures. It also enables the prediction of composite material performance, fostering the creation of lightweight and resilient products.
Fluid Simulation
Fluid simulation models the behavior of fluids, such as air, water, and oil, as they flow through products or systems. It is particularly useful for projects involving complex fluid dynamics, such as the combustion of gases in automobile engines, airflow through jet engine turbines, and heat transfer among components on printed circuit boards.
Applications of Fluid Simulation
Spanning diverse industries and fields, fluid simulation techniques like CHT, Multiphase Flows, Reacting Flows, and FSI provide invaluable insights for performance optimization.
- Conjugate Heat Transfer (CHT): CHT simulates heat transfer between fluids and solids.
- Multiphase Flows – Multiphase flows can be used to model mixing, separation, mass transfer between two or more phases
- Reacting Flows – Reacting flows can predict product concentrations in the domain after species undergo reaction such as in combustion or electrochemistry
- Fluid-Structure Interaction (FSI): FSI simulates the interaction between fluids and structures.
Electronics Simulation
Electronics simulation models how an electronic device, component, or circuit performs under various conditions, including input signals, component values, and operating environments. These models can be subdivided broadly into three categories: analog, digital, and mixed-mode.
- Analog Simulations: Focus on continuous-time, continuous-value signals, and systems.
- Digital Simulations: Focus on discrete-time, discrete-value signals, and digital systems.
- Mixed-Mode Simulations: Combine both techniques to analyze mixed-signal circuits that contain both analog and digital components.
Simulating a circuit’s behavior before construction can significantly improve design efficiency, enabling engineers to detect and address flaws early in development. Simulation is particularly beneficial for modeling integrated circuits, where tooling is expensive and impractical and testing internal systems is challenging. Power integrity, EMI/EMC, and signal integrity analysis can guard against fluctuating input voltages, electromagnetic interference or emissions, and crosstalk.
Electromagnetic simulations model the performance of the electromagnetic components of a device in both low and high frequency domains, by allowing visualization of electromagnetic fields. These types of simulation can encompass:
Low Frequency Electromagnetic Simulations: Permanent magnets, electromagnets, coils, motor/generators, actuators, sensors, transformers, wireless charging.
High Frequency Electromagnetic Simulations: Antenna performance, RF, microwave, filters, transmission lines
Simultaneous simulation of both electromagnetic and electronic device operation provides more comprehensive benefits and faster development times. Note as well that electromagnetic and electronic simulations can be conducted at varying scales – from the microchip level, to packaging, PCB board, component, sub-component, and the whole system level – such as a battleship or a city. At an even larger scale, the whole system for space applications can include satellites in orbit around the earth and their ground stations.
Optics Simulation
Optics simulation allows you to accurately and robustly simulate your optical and optically enabled products. Conduct precise analysis, optimization, and tolerancing of your systems to ensure that these systems are designed for manufacture and can be built at scale and brought to market quickly. Leverage physics-based light simulation to understand how your products look under real-world lighting and usage conditions, to visualize future products.
Optical simulation can simulate the propagation of light through optical and optically enabled products from the nano- to the macro- level, allowing for integrated modeling and co-simulation that enables the accurate and robust design of such products. It includes these capabilities:
- Ray Tracing: Sequential or nonsequential ray tracing can be used to simulate light propagation through your optical systems.
- Perceived Visual Appearance: Human and other sensors can simulate what you or a camera will see prior to prototyping.
- Structural, thermal, and optical performance (STOP) analysis: the impact of structural deformation or thermal fluctuations on optical performance can be accounted for.
- Design for Manufacturability: The impact of manufacturing tolerances on a design can be simulated and compensated for, prior to production.
- Photonic Simulation: Nano-scale photonic components, circuits, and systems can be simulated to enable novel optical capabilities.
Vibration and Acoustics
Sounds elicit strong emotions that can add or detract significantly from a product’s user experience. One engineering error that leads to poor sound quality can render an otherwise perfectly designed product unusable.
Vibration and acoustic simulation help prevent such slip-ups from happening. These tools allow engineers to foresee how structures and systems react to vibrational forces and sound waves, ensuring the final product strikes a harmonious balance between top-notch functionality and crystal-clear acoustics.
Advanced Capabilities in Vibration and Acoustic Simulation
Whether examining an electric vehicle (EV), turbine, or home speaker system, engineering simulation software empowers you to uncover a range of acoustic characteristics without creating a single physical prototype. Below are some examples.
- Assessing and Refining Sound Quality: Seamlessly integrate acoustic simulations with empirical data from laboratory tests to meticulously analyze and refine sound quality across a diverse array of products.
- Enhancing Engine Acoustics: Elevate electric and traditional motor design by audibly experiencing the acoustics of the motor and its sub-components at various speeds. Using simulation data to minimize noise and vibration creates a more immersive, enjoyable, and secure driving experience.
Rendering Component-to-System Sound: Immerse yourself in the auditory experience of your product and its individual components in true-to-life settings, simulating daily usage to ensure optimal performance.
Materials Data
Many of the above simulations depend on accurate materials data to obtain accurate simulation results. Material and process choices – for example, the use of rare earths in magnet design – can dictate availability and cost. A known-good repository of materials data makes selection and evaluation of cost-reducing and performance enhancing materials easier and faster earlier in your design cycle, speeding your time to market.