What’s New? CORTIME 1.3.6

Robust Design

Design failure! Two words that will make any R&D Engineer tense up. For all the hard work, calculations and simulations you put into your CAD model, it is always an ideal which possess a risk of design failures when exposed to the uncertainties of real-life circumstances. Especially, when you are optimizing your designs they can be “fragile” in terms of variation of material properties and operating conditions. However, accounting for these circumstances is a challenge in the design process. You can try to calculate your own risk assessment, but it quickly becomes difficult to account for all the factors which your design is sensitive to.

You will be happy to know that CORTIME has your back. We have created the first integrated robust design tool in SolidWorks. This means that you finally have a tool at your disposal which you can use to determine the impact of controllable and uncontrollable factors on your design. The robust design tool is located in the CORTIME task pane from which the R&D Engineer can use the probability of failures as objectives, when optimizing their designs.

In CORTIME, all you have to do is set up variable distributions based on your production tolerances. Then you define your acceptable failure criteria for the design you are working on. After that, you are ready to start the robust design analysis. Designs with small variations inside the production tolerances are tested and the probabilities of failure are presented.

On the bottom line, the robust design tool helps you design for Six Sigma by accounting for the variation to avoid cliffs of optimal performance. This will result in fewer product failures. Among the many benefits of reducing design failures are shortened design cycles, more consistent product quality and minimized costs in QA, production and for client warranties.

Response Surface

Though, it is often preferable to run direct optimizations they can often take up a lot of computational time. When they do take a lot of time, it is because heavy simulation studies have to be run for every iteration. Although, you have the luxury of automating this process with CORTIME, thereby utilizing the hours you are not working, sometimes you need faster results.

To provide you a fast and accurate design exploration alternative, we have been perfecting a response surface algorithm. With response surface optimizations, CORTIME uses machine learning to build a predictive model for the simulation results. Consequently, you can run the simulation study fewer times, and the response surface will interpolate results between them. In the newest release, we have made it easier for the user to create new response surfaces, reuse existing ones as they are or after improving them. Quantifying the estimation errors for the current response surfaces makes it easy to determine if improvement on the current response surface is necessary.

This 3D graph shows sampling points along with the model prediction for the maximum temperature of a heat sink. The variables in this case were the fin size and the number of fins on the heat sink. 

The new and improved response surface gives the opportunity to get fast insight into your design and the potential for improvement. Once you have found an optimal design with the response surface, you can use that as a starting point for one of CORTIME’s other algorithms, which will then need much less iterations to test and refine the design.

Flow Boundary Conditions

Good news for all the CORTIME users out there using flow simulation. So far it has only been possible to use flow goals to optimize the geometry of your design, but now you can also use the flow boundary conditions. This means that you can also use fluid and environment properties, like fluid velocity or ambient pressure, both as variables and objectives in your design exploration.

Now, both Flow Goals and Boundary Conditions are accessible in the CORTIME task pane and can be used as both variables and objectives in your optimizations. In this example, an internal flow in a pipe case, the internal shape of the pipe and the inlet mass flow (boundary condition) is optimized to reach the maximum outlet velocity possible (flow surface goal).

As a SolidWorks Flow Simulation user, you now have a much wider range of variables to choose from. Coupled with the fact that CORTIME is the only design exploration tool that provides integrated Multi-Study optimizations in SolidWorks with flow studies, CORTIME is rapidly evolving into every flow enthusiasts dream.

Help Section Re-design

At the core of CORTIME is the aim to make the most user-friendly design exploration tool out there. To achieve that we are constantly producing tutorials and examples, so anyone can start using CORTIME in a matter of minutes. But this help content only has value, if it is easily accessible to the user.

That is why we have redesigned the CORTIME help section, to make it even easier for you to access all the relevant materials. Besides the tutorials and examples the user manual is right at the top when you access the help section.

The revamped help section.

So if you still haven’t tried out CORTIME, download a free trial now and use the help section to get started.