RESOURCE LIBRARY

Discover how designers, engineers and managers benefit from ESTECO Technology to simplify their DESIGN&BUILD process. Using VOLTA simulation process & data management, and design optimization capabilities, they collaboratively assessed the performance of structural elements of a new company building to maximize office space capacity. ## Why Design&Build and Simulation Process and Data Management Collaboration between design and construction has traditionally been playing an important role in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry. Takenaka Corporation, one of the top construction companies in Japan, ensures certified process and construction quality at the highest levels with its integral DESIGN&BUILD system. This methodology integrates architecture, building technology, and construction in a unified flow of work from concept through completion, replacing the traditional approach where the design and construction phases of a building project are carried out in a sequential manner. The DESIGN&BUILD system leads to many advantages: effective communication, unified quality, effective timing and cost overruns, and reduced completion time. In fact, architects and engineers collaborate with each other, share data, and are updated on various requirements to deliver innovative building solutions and meet clients’ expectations. When Takenaka Corporation embraced the DESIGN&BUILD system, it looked for a reliable Simulation Process and Data Management (SPDM) platform. That is why they partnered with ESTECO to simplify the whole simulation design process, manage a huge amount of data across teams, and shorten product development time. Designers, engineers and managers involved in the architectural projects access ESTECO VOLTA from a web browser and intuitively interact with the simulation process. From running 3D building simulations to applying design optimization techniques, analyze results and share data on the internal cloud for collaborative decision making. ## Expanding 3D building modeling and design optimization techniques across the enterprise Conducting manually parametric studies on 3D building models can become a time-consuming process leading to delays in project schedules. Overcoming these challenges for designers and engineers at Takenaka Corporation translate into an extensive use of ESTECO process automation, integration, and design optimization technology to significantly accelerate the architectural simulation design process. By combining modeling solvers as Rhino3D/Grasshopper, Abaqus, Midas iGen, or other in-house design software in modeFRONTIER powerful workflow, they can execute complex simulation chains and evaluate thousands of complex geometries in a short time. On top of that, applying ESTECO state-of-the-art design exploration and optimization algorithms to assess the correlation between several requirements (room size, thermal comfort, structural design to name a few) and maximize the building performance. At Takenaka, they had to make a step forward to expand the usage of 3D building modeling and design optimization techniques across teams with different expertise. Indeed, designers and engineers usually perform simple data analysis and are not necessarily confident in simulation and workflow set-up execution. Moreover, the DESIGN&BUILD methodology requires effective collaboration between the different actors involved in the simulation process to make changes and update their models for further analysis. This gap has been filled by scaling up modeFRONTIER desktop solution capabilities across the enterprise with the ESTECO VOLTA collaborative web platform. It enables simulation experts to create and make the simulation workflow ready to be executed via web. Then, designers and engineers can use these simulation models, apply design optimization techniques, and analyze results in the VOLTA platform. Since the simulation data are accessible in their internal cloud, it is easier for them to quickly interact with the simulation experts asking for updated CAD/CAE models when design changes are required. In the end, managers can log in to the VOLTA web platform, access product performance metrics, and monitor the whole simulation product development advancements. This scenario has been successfully applied in the early design phase of a new office building project. VOLTA made simulation usable by different teams to optimize structural elements in order to guarantee maximum office space capacity. Use case: rationalize the slab shape of an office building with VOLTA web collaborative platform Expanding the usage of simulation and optimization became a true fact when Takenaka’s designers and engineers had to collaborate in order to assess the performance of structural elements for a new office building. The subcontracted project required to drastically reduce the number of columns to make the most of the office space. However, the expected distance between the columns is about 17 meters, which is quite a lot according to the Japanese regulations. This has an unavoidable impact on the flat surface of a slab, a common structural element used to construct floors and ceilings. The slab needs a proper curve in order to guarantee the stiffness. Although, a side effect of the increased curvature may unbalance the floor forces and cause local additional bending moments. The solution is not just filling the curved slab shape, rather including massive amounts of ribs in some areas. To achieve this, the company’s designers and engineers combined the use of 3D building modeling techniques with ESTECO VOLTA collaborative web platform to explore reasonable volume amounts and coverage of the slab. First, they used Rhino3D/Grasshopper to create and model the shape of the office building and then converted it (in Grasshopper) to be meshed in Midas iGen to perform structural analysis. In the end, the several outputs from finite element analysis such as maximum displacement and the stress were extracted by using a python script. The interaction between the different simulation solvers was automated in the modeFRONTIER workflow coupled within the ESTECO VOLTA platform environment. This enabled simulation experts to upload the modeFRONTIER workflow and execute it through a web interface. Then, the structural engineers benefited from the VOLTA Advisor, a web environment for advanced post-processing and data visualization, to assess the simulation results from the finite element analysis model and validate the deformed shape of the all structure. For the same project, they also performed additional analysis through the VOLTA Planner dashboard, a modular interface to apply several optimization strategies in an intuitive way. This allowed them to easily create new simulation plans, change parameters bound, objectives and constraints with the aim of finding the best designs with minimized both the building weight and the maximum displacement of slab. “Thanks to the VOLTA HPC & Cloud capabilities, we were able to evaluate more than 700 designs in just four days. The VOLTA Player interface allowed to execute these computational heavy multi objective optimization analysis on the cloud without having to think how resources are used remotely”. Toru Inaba, Computational Design Group at Takenaka Corporation, also said that one of the key benefits of using VOLTA is to make simulation data accessible to a broader team of designers and engineers. “In particular,” concluded Toru Inaba, “our simulation experts could share the best practices on how to use the VOLTA Advisor, the web environment for advanced data analysis and visualization, with the structural engineers. The VOLTA web platform and its apps enabled us to truly democratize our DESIGN&BUILD simulation process. Designers and engineers can now access to the simulation results in one click and collaboratively take decisions without only relying on siloed reports of data”.

Toyota has virtualized a significant portion of its calibration and testing process, reducing dramatically the development time and man-hours dedicated to it. Mr. Goh [Project manager, TMC Laboratory Automation System, Toyota Technical Development Corp.] and Mr. Goto [Group Manager, Power Train Company, Engine Management System Development] talk about the benefits of using automated Design Exploration techniques to verify actuator responses and identify the best control values. “It’s easy to find the optimal control value for a single actuator but when looking to improve EGR, supercharging, VTT, direct injection, etc. With the number of actuators and consequently of the output variables and constraints, manually identifying the optimal control values would require a massive amount of time due to measurement tasks.”, says Mr. Goh. ## Methodology To test the engine, temperature and pressure sensors, torque and fuel consumption (gauge) meter and exhaust gas analyzer are installed and the control systems are implemented accordingly. The combined software iTEST and ORION – the automated control and measurement system for engine bench test implemented at Toyota – manages the controls equipment and collects the output from each instrument. These values are then validated by checking the reference maps. The complexity of the calibration procedure is streamlined by including modeFRONTIER in the process, directly integrated with ORION – that is used for automatic measurements. This replaces all the manual measurement tasks conducted at the engine test bench (laboratory) and relieves the team from the burden of the repeated iterations between the “design room” and the “laboratory”, where now measurement, modelling and accuracy evaluation can be automatically repeated. “To understand the output trend and find the optimal solution with experimental points, we used mFC to create a Design of Experiment, measure data, train and compare metamodels (RSMs). The next step of the process consists in determining the optimal Engine Control Units maps and finally test again on the real engine.” “mFC succeeds in reducing the difficulties experienced by calibration engineers when using tools for model-based calibration by providing a dedicated graphic interface to directly set parameters, lower and upper bounds. mFC automatically generates designs and RSMs, then iteratively evaluates the accuracy levels and stops the evaluations when the target model accuracy is reached.” Mr. Goh says. Since real engine test is influenced by the variability of control variables and by measurements error, sometimes the combination of temperature, pressure and torque cause the stop of the testing for safety reasons. ## Benefits By using a visual filter in mFC, this issue is easily identified and the DOE is automatically substituted with a more suitable dataset. “In any case, during the evaluation, it is easy to stop mFC and change the DOE. Given certain scenarios, with this technique we can reduce the number of evaluation by 50%” Mr Goh says. This method empowers the system engineering process by adding the capabilities of simulation and automation in the right side of the V-cycle, the experimental evaluation phase of the Verification and Validation model, where is hardly used. ESTECO modeFRONTIER technology has been widely used in the engine modeling phase, in combination with GT-SUITE. Mr. Goto says that by reciprocally using optimization result as continuous feedback between the design and testing phases, there is great potential for further accuracy improvement. “By performing optimization with real engine data, we can leverage the efficiency and accuracy gained during the testing back in model design. Thanks to the common use of both data and models, designer and calibration experts can work together and further improve our operations” concluded Mr. Goh, stressing collaboration among experts as a major benefit of this technology.

Multidisciplinary collaboration made easy at Airworks Engineering Airworks, a multidisciplinary company for mechanical engineering, was facing the challenge of improving efficiency in the conversion of wind energy into electrical power by optimizing the whole assembly of a wind power unit rotor. ## Challenge Experts in wind power unit, specialists in CAD (Computer Aided Design) and CFD (Computational Fluid-Dynamics) professionals from different organizations were involved in a complex design scenario and needed to collaborate by effectively sharing a different kinds of information and resources. Engineers from the University of Trieste prepared the parametric CAD model and set up CFD simulations, while Airworks took care of aerodynamic performance calculations of the wind rotor blade, and subsequently performed optimization analysis with modeFRONTIER, the multidisciplinary optimization platform. The need for a common platform to share results emerged rapidly, and was successfully tackled with SOMO software solution (now evolved in VOLTA SPDM enterprise platform). This enabled the seamless execution of inter-organizational simulation workflows. ## Solution With SOMO each partner of the simulation workflow was able to contribute to the project providing its own high level of collaboration. The CAD expert generated the geometry of the blades providing a parametric model and the CAD solution used to update it, while the CFD expert set up the aerodynamic simulation model, which used the geometry to evaluate the rotor aerodynamic performance. Both simulation workflows were made available to partners in a shared repository. Then the wind power unit expert was able to integrate his performance evaluation software into an automated multi-disciplinary workflow. Ultimately he used the workflow to evaluate the power efficiency of the system and to optimize it in a complete range of environmental conditions. ## Benefits Through the entire process, simulation data and engineering knowledge were effectively managed and shared through SOMO, allowing a faster process and a considerable resource-saving”, says Stefano Picinich, Airworks Engineering Managing Director. With the set up of the optimization workflow, Airworks professionals were able to explore and evaluate new parametric geometry, leading to innovative designs, analyzed by the decision-maker via the post-processing tools. The considerable result was of a wind turbine design with an outstanding power coefficient and an annual energy production increase of respectively 1.26% and 0.47%.

Bouygues Construction develops innovation to support companies with new construction methods and materials, while considering future usages. The main requirements for a new construction include objective measures, flexibility, industrialization, collaboration and sustainability. Bouygues Construction develops innovation to support companies with new construction methods and materials, while considering future usages. The main requirements for a new construction include objective measures, flexibility, industrialization, collaboration and sustainability. Moreover, customers also ask for innovative and evolving buildings. Bouygues keeps developing innovative processes together with a collaborative Multidisciplinary Design Optimization (MDO) platform, which allows the various actors involved in the project to make quicker decisions and have a crystal clear overview of the possible solutions. Cover image: courtesy of Bouygues Construction | Morpheus Hotel | credit photo Virgile Simon Bertrand (2018) Challenge A building is a prototype that is manufactured once. It’s not a functional project like a car or an airplane, where a design process can be profitable thanks to the sales volumes involved. On top of this, a building is created on site with local resources and labour, as well as environmental challenges that need to be taken into account. Engineers have to mix different disciplines such as cost engineering, methods, structure (reinforce concrete, steel, timber etc.), and building life cycle. Bouygues Construction had to take into consideration a variety of disciplines and variables to optimize building performances and propose the most adapted design to its client. ## Solution Bouygues has automated the design process of a building floor with modeFRONTIER, considering 26 input parameters such as geometry, solutions, usage specifications, structural dimensions, unit prices, and unit times of construction. The outputs were the costs, construction pace, carbon footprint. Within the VOLTA collaborative platform, engineers succeeded in implementing different construction designs and provided the most profitable and the most sustainable solutions to the building team. This was possible thanks to the seamless integration of the simulation tools currently deployed at Bouygues. This was performed in as little as two days with one engineer. “The good software is the one the designer knows and masters - explained Sylvain Géry, Senior Structural Engineer at Bouygues Construction - ESTECO Technology can easily integrate with any simulation solver. This helps when a project involves different countries and enterprises who are used to working with different tools”. Benefits Thanks to the ESTECO Technologies for process automation, design optimization and simulation data management, Bouygues fastened the simulation process and reduced the overall design project time. Engineers built multidisciplinary processes and effectively coordinated all the phases involved. They could also assess the final design performance while considering costs and carbon footprint. Moreover, the collaboration between experts from different areas and the traceability of the simulation model evolution simplified the management of the project. In the building industry there are many construction options available. “Thanks to MDO, - Géry said - we could objectively quantify the benefits of the various construction types and identify the most appropriate combination of material usage, material technology and construction workers costs.”