ESTECO’s North American modeFRONTIER User Meeting 2013 Proceedings Available for Download

The third gathering of North American modeFRONTIER in Plymouth Nov. 6-7 drew more than 120 optimization practitioners.The 13 speakers covered the latest applications, methods and techniques used in optimizing design processes and enhancing product innovation. As the media sponsor, Desktop Engineering was on hand to cover the event.

Carlo Poloni, president of ESTECO

The 2013 North American Users’ Meeting was opened by Nader Fateh, vice president of Business Development for ESTECO North America, followed by Carlo Poloni, president of ESTECO, who gave an overview of the company’s global operations and the latest updates on product portfolios.

John Mannisto, engineering director, Simulation Based Design at Whirlpool Corp., presented the first keynote titled “Driving Product Development with CAE and System Design.”

By adopting consistent methods and shared models that are able to drive process integration from early product development through to execution and maintenance, global companies are able to turn their size into an advantage. modeFRONTIER helps system models become accessible to a range of end-users promoting multiple views of “one version of truth,” and supporting a future-state “model-centric” mindset, according to the company.

During the afternoon session, Whirlpool’s Greg Garstecki, principal engineer, Global Fabric Care System Modeling, added his design perspective with a presentation titled “Attribute Modeling and System Level Performance Optimization for Household Appliances.”

Whirlool’s Garstecki: Modeling performance of attributes provides common understanding with design teams on 4 continents #modeFRONTIER #UM13

” DE Editors (@DEeditor) November 6, 2013

Sumeet Parashar, technical manager at ESTECO North America, presented the highlights and new features of the three new main releases of ESTECO products: modeFRONTIER 4.5, mF4LV and SOMO.

This year’s  guest of honor from the academic world, Kalyanmoy Deb, Koenig Endowed Chair Professor at Michigan State University, held an invited lecture titled “Towards Handling Many Objectives: Initial Results Using NSGA-III.” Deb is working with his team at the Electrical & Computer Engineering Department toward a scalable evolutionary synthesis system using genetic programming capable of dealing with systems such as electric circuits and mechatronic systems with hundreds, or even thousands, of components. The research on the NSGA-III algorithm is driven by the attainment of the ideal evolutionary system, characterized with three desirable attributes: scalability (large-scale problems can be solved when given more computing resources), sustainability (better, more innovative solutions can be continually discovered given more computing efforts) and robustness (reasonable results can be obtained with high probability given a certain amount of computing cycles).

Read Desktop Engineering Contributing Editor Beth Stackpole’s overview of modeFRONTIER 4.5 here.

The third keynote, presented by Ren-Jye Yang, Optimization & Robustness at Ford Research & Advanced Engineering, gave participants a comprehensive and historic overview of the Design Optimization Application in the Automotive industry, focusing especially on the increasing complexity tackled by the evolving optimization methods and tools, and the growing willingness to adopt this approach across organizations.

Users presentations this year included:

• Ambikapathy Naganathan, structural and dynamic analysis engineer at Cummins, who spoke about his work with modeFRONTIER. He used it to integrate a GT Valvetrain and GT Power Model for the optimization of a valve event.
• Victor Nino, manager of Virtual Technology at Modine Manufacturing presented “Heat Exchanger Tank Design Optimization using CFD and modeFRONTIER.”
• Robert Lotz from BorgWarner Turbo Systems who presented on turbocharger compressor optimization.
• Ciro Soto (Ford Research & Advanced Engineering) and Jingwen Hu (Transportation Research Institute, University of Michigan) who shared two applications in vehicle development.
• Professor Enrico Nobile (University of Trieste) who presented “CFD-based Cavitation Prediction: Model Calibration with modeFRONTIER and Successful Application of Propeller Hydrodynamics.”

SOMO, the enterprise collaborative and distributed execution framework recently released by ESTECO that helps manage the complexity of running multidisciplinary design projects, had the starring role in the closing presentation given by Poloni, who explained the software’s new approach to collaborative workflows using a case study developed by Airworks, the University of Trieste and ESTECO as an example from the wind energy industry.

Shouldn’t refuse this: Poloni wraps up day with devoted #modeFRONTIER user group with invite to Trieste for next meeting May 2014! #UM13

” DE Editors (@DEeditor) November 6, 2013

On November 7 in the same location, ESTECO North America organized two training courses intended for new and advanced users. The two courses offered users the chance to experience the new features of the just-released modeFRONTIER 4.5 and the opportunity to learn more about modeFRONTIER post-processing tools, robust design and response surface methodology.

For more information, download the UM13 proceedings and visit ESTECO’s website.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.