Multi-disciplinary design approach with the Altair HyperWorks suite

For this circuit breaker project, Altair's flexible access to a wider range of CAE tools came in very handy, as electromagnetic, mechanic, control strategy, and other requirements needed to be considered at the same time. This multi-disciplinary design approach – based on use of Flux, MotionSolve and Activate together, including through co-simulation – allowed Schneider Electric engineers to evaluate numerous variants and identify the optimal design parameters for the various operating conditions.

“Altair’s global Licensing system makes a big difference for us. With other current vendors, we need to request trial licenses for their different tools to evaluate if our desired computations and workflows will indeed be suitable. In which case, normally, we would need to pay for these tools. With Altair’s Licensing approach, based on non-consumable tokens, we can test and use different products or workflows with low or no additional cost," said Leopoldo Martinez Garrido, CAE and 3D simulation manager at Schneider Electric. By combining 1D and 3D models, Schneider was able to successfully simulate their circuit breaker as the complete system-of-systems that it is. Activate enabled the engineers to model their control strategy and electronics disciplines. These results were then combined with the 3D models from Flux and MotionSolve.

Promising results and early findings

With valuable engineering support and thought leadership provided by Altair, Schneider Electric set up the complete multi-disciplinary simulation model and started conducting simulations for various configurations. The multi-disciplinary approach revealed some interesting findings. The good news was the very close correlation between simulation results and test data, but the engineers also realized that only two of the three sets of operating conditions they tested (at different voltages and temperatures) provided satisfactory performance.

The simulation showed that the third operating condition would require a new coil for the circuit breaker to perform as expected at the intended voltage and temperature points. But even this bad news, in this case, was actually good news. Obtaining these results so early in the development process saved Schneider Electric from pursuing the development of a product that would not have worked robustly under all anticipated operating conditions. Instead, they were able to focus on a new development path which helped them maintain their high product standards, superior customer satisfaction, and an excellent corporate reputation for providing products that perform with high reliability.

Meeting time to market – benefits of a multi-disciplinary simulation approach

Schneider Electric was able to meet the ambitious time-to-market goal of four months. As this approach was really the only way for them to realize this project on-time, it cannot be estimated how long it would have taken them with traditional methods. They benefited in numerous ways from extending their use of Altair tools to Activate and MotionSolve to perform increasingly complex simulations with Flux. By combining 1D simulation (for controls strategy and electronics) with 3D simulation (for electromagnetics and mechanics), they were able to fully evaluate the intended configurations and identify critical issues at an early stage. Consequently, the multi-disciplinary approach allowed for early risk management, preventing the engineers from moving in the wrong design direction or building prototypes which wouldn’t work. In the end, Schneider Electric was very satisfied with Altair’s support engineers, who helped their own engineers accelerate their learning curve regarding the new software tools and achieve their goal of using simulation to develop better products, faster.