The New Obama fuel mileage requirements for cars are music to the ears of the American steel industry. That might seem odd. After all, aren’t a lot of those concept cars rolled out of Detroit every year loaded with plastic and other lightweight materials options? Yes, but a lot of those concepts remain concepts. Take the Chevy Volt for example. It was first shown at the Detroit Auto Show in January 2007 with a polycarbonate roof and a hood made from recycled soda bottles. Once GM decided to actually make the Volt, those two ideas were quickly dropped. Too impractical. Too expensive. A study recently released by the American Iron and Steel Institute predicts a 10 percent annual growth rate in the use of advanced high-strength steels through 2020 as auto makers try to meet tough new fuel standards.
A new process for laser-welding large-scale, steel-aluminum foam sandwich structures for lightweighting ships, which eliminates intermetallic phase, has been demonstrated.
A major advance in repairing composite structures combining robots and lasers bodes well for commercial aircraft such as the Boeing 787 Dreamliner and Airbus A350XWB, which contain composites in large proportions of their structures.
Against a backdrop of mounting product complexity and a need to keep a lid on development costs, companies are recognizing a need to make simulation a more integral part of the design process. In response, vendors in the CAD world are building out CAE functionality as part of their CAD suites while simulation vendors are building tighter integrations to leading CAD tools. Keith Meintjes, Ph.D., Practice Manager, Simulation and Analysis at CIMdata, Inc., joins Design News CAD Editor Beth Stackpole in this radio program to explore the new face of integrated CAD and CAE, how companies are benefitting from this tighter partnership between platforms, and how integrating CAE earlier in the development cycle pays off in optimized product designs.
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