Lightweight Engineering
LIGHTER IS BETTER

Lighter products help reduce material requirements and use less energy
CATIA Lightweight Engineering provides designers with the expert capabilities to minimize part weight, maximize stiffness, reduce cost and optimize material usage. Designers must push past conventional ways of working to think outside the box. Meeting customer demands is imperative which means innovating one concept at a time is no longer a sustainable method.
Let’s have a closer look the various technics that will help in finding the right balance in reducing weight, cost and material usage and maintaining or increasing strength, stability and safety.
CATIA Lightweight Engineering solution seamlessly integrates design, simulation and analysis, through to manufacturing across all disciplines within the 3DEXPERIENCE platform. Refine, validate and complete collaboratively and in-context.
Cognitive Augmented Design is a weight optimization solution also called "Function-Driven Generative Design".
Explore and generate lightweight shapes, on target, addressing both additive and conventional manufacturing processes. Cognitive Augmented Design strategy as well as an overview on the powerful capabilities already available to Design Engineers with CATIA Functional Generative Design user-roles, leveraging CATIA and SIMULIA technologies on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform.
eSeminars
This 20-minute webinar provides an overview of solutions to see how Function-Driven Generative Design is used for additive manufacturing using Dassault Systèmes' full portfolio of integrated applications that works seamlessly across design, manufacturing, and in-service performance.
Learn how cognitive augmented design delivers optimal design concepts while respecting functional requirements and specifications. Dr. Keith Meintjes from CIMdata will provide industry analyst leadership around the state of functional generative design.
Presentation
Digitally accelerating additive manufacturing - A full portfolio of integrated applications for additive manufacturing that works seamlessly across design, manufacturing, and in-service performance.
Simulation-driven Design is another breakthrough concept using simulation to optimize structures thanks to simulation, find optimal shape and produce lighter products. This solution merges design and simulation at the early conceptual phase and allows creating and modifying implicitly parametric surface models efficiently. It accelerates the product development process because CAE tests and simulation are pushed upstream and performed during the geometry creation.
Dassault Systèmes Solutions
Design and analysis in a concurrent feedback loop. Save time, reduce cost and improve product quality.
CAE and CAD teams in body structure design invest in CATIA | SFE CONCEPT to create a conceptual geometry quickly and early in the process.
Papers
Reverse Engineering deals with transitions between digital and physical worlds.
The best example is to digitalize good existing legacy products and assets that do not have a CAD model. A physical scan allows reconstructing the model at the right scale; boosted by additive manufacturing, this part can be optimized and reworked and be made lighter.
For composites materials, CATIA provides an all-in-one solution to cover the whole engineering to manufacturing process of high quality composite parts.
It delivers tools to cover both the preliminary and detailed design phases while taking into account, even at the concept stage, the product's requirements for its manufacturability. At all stages of the design process, the manufacturability of the parts can be easily assessed with fiber simulation for hand layup or for fiber placement laying, ensuring the release of a producible composites part with regards to the targeted manufacturing process.
eSeminar
Purdue University explores in 30 minutes their Composites Virtual Factory, an integrated workflow application for the design of additively manufactured parts and components.
This cost-effective Sheet-metal manufacturing process of shaping ductile metals such as aluminum and steel. Transform several welded assembled parts in a single part made in a single step.
Hydro-formed parts are often be made with a higher stiffness-to-weight ratio and at a lower per unit cost.
CATIA provides an associative feature-based modeling making it possible to design sheet metal representations in concurrent engineering.
Have a look at the detailed article in the CATIA User Community
This sheet-metal solution helps the tooling designer in the formability analysis, operations planning validated with geometric analysis.
Manufacturing process and complexity are directly linked with the part shape, it's a key element is determining what is feasible.
How to simplify your Stamping Die Face Design? discover more on the CATIA User Community
eSeminar
- Simplify your Die Face design
Optimize your design process in the stamping and metal forming technology