Pioneering Engineering Firm Gordon Murray Design Selects HyperWorks to Develop the T.25 City Car

TROY, Mich., Jan. 24, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Altair Engineering, Inc., a leading global provider of simulation technology and engineering services that empowers client innovation and decision-making, announced today that Surrey-based Gordon Murray Design chose the HyperWorks product suite to develop the T.25 City Car.

The 30-people strong team with over 500 years of combined automotive industry experience has produced a revolutionary city car that addresses congestion, carbon footprint and emissions. With aggressive targets, including a weight of 550kg, fuel consumption of less than half of the UK average and best in class CO2 emissions, the team turned to HyperWorks to help achieve their ambition.

"We decided to invest in HyperWorks because it offers the most integrated range of computer aided engineering applications," said Frank Coppuck, Engineering Director of Gordon Murray Design.

The HyperWorks pre-processor HyperMesh was used to build and assemble the T.25 CAE model, which was subsequently analyzed for a variety of load cases and performance measures using the suite's RADIOSS solver.  The results were then post-processed and visualized in Altair HyperView. The combined use of the HyperWorks tools helped the engineering team design a lighter car in a significantly reduced timescale. The light weight will further enhance the city car's road performance through less fuel consumption and, ultimately, lower CO2 emissions.

OptiStruct, Altair's award winning optimization tool, will be used by Gordon Murray Design in the future to help further refine primary structures. In the meantime, RADIOSS is used to analyse the torsion stiffness, bending stiffness, frontal offset loading and normal mode characteristics of the vehicle.

"RADIOSS correlates really well with reality and has exceeded our expectations. The team needed the tests to be as close to reality as possible and achieved correlation within two percent for the torsion and bending stiffness load cases.  Less than five percent is a good result, less than two percent is excellent," said Simon Maher, Senior Stress and Materials Engineer responsible for CAE and test correlation at Gordon Murray Design.

"Another important benefit of choosing HyperWorks is the flexible licensing system," said Simon Maher. "You can buy the software through tokens and that lets you bring new software into play as and when you need it, and that's really an advantage for a small engineering firm like us. Furthermore, the Altair support team has and continues to provide an excellent level of assistance."

"HyperWorks has proved to be invaluable to our engineers' everyday life at Gordon Murray Design and has assisted our business in continuing to develop innovative vehicles," says Gordon Murray, Engineering Director at Gordon Murray Design.

"We are delighted Gordon Murray Design chose to invest in HyperWorks to develop the T.25 city car," said David Mason, Managing Director for Altair, UK. "The breadth and advanced capabilities of HyperWorks together with Altair's value-based licensing system offers smaller high-tech engineering firms a complete MCAE platform to streamline the development of award winning products. We look forward to continuing to work with Gordon Murray Design to deeply embed optimization and CAE automation as part of their development process to help achieve their business objectives."

To learn more about how HyperWorks, attend the Altair Technology Conference on May 10, 2011 at The Heritage Motor Centre in Gaydon, Warwickshire. To register for the free event, visit www.altairhyperworks.co.uk/Technology.

About Gordon Murray Design

Gordon Murray Design was established in 2007 to develop an innovative and disruptive automotive manufacturing technology trademarked iStream® and the design and prototyping of the T.25 City Car was central to the validation and development of iStream®.  The company has the complete in-house capability for design, prototyping and development of whole car programmes and is currently focussing on leading edge concepts and prototype automotive vehicles that are energy efficient and low cost. For more information please visit www.gordonmurraydesign.com.  

The T.25 won two recent accolades for a car of its class in The Royal Automobile Club's RAC Brighton to London Future Car Challenge Rally. It won Most Economic Small Passenger ICE Vehicle and Most Economic and Environment Friendly Small Passenger ICE Vehicle.

About HyperWorks

Built on a foundation of design optimization, performance data management and process automation, HyperWorks is an enterprise simulation solution for rapid design exploration and decision-making. As the most comprehensive, open-architecture CAE solution in the industry, HyperWorks includes best-in-class modelling, analysis, visualization and data management solutions for linear and non-linear, structural optimization, fluid-structure interaction, and multi-body dynamics applications. For more information please visit www.altairhyperworks.com.

About Altair

Altair Engineering, Inc. empowers client innovation and decision-making through technology that optimises the analysis, management and visualization of business and engineering information. Privately held, with more than 1,400 employees, Altair has offices throughout North America, South America, Europe and Asia/Pacific. With a 25-year-plus track record for enterprise analytics, product development and advanced computing, Altair consistently delivers a competitive advantage to customers in a broad range of industries. To learn more, please visit www.altair.com.

SOURCE Altair Engineering, Inc.