Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC)

Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC)

To meet the global demand for more sustainable, more sophisticated structures – be they super-tall buildings, protective designs, industrial structures, factories, warehousing, transport infrastructure, communication towers or free-form façade systems – the construction industry is in a transformative period.

The pressure’s on to hasten design processes and improve their accuracy by using simulation tools for structural analysis and to use big data, machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) to predict their performance.

When designing and building the world’s most innovative structures, all these challenges and more are solvable through Altair’s world-class design solutions. By accurately modeling and predicting complex structural behavior, wind-induced actions, seismic actions, and other performance factors, we optimize your structure’s performance, mitigate design risks, and ensure you meet code, safety, deadline, and cost specifications.

CUSTOMER STORY

Completing Gaudi's Vision with Inspiration from Nature

The Sagrada Familia Foundation team used Altair's optimization and concept generations technology to finish the iconic Catheral in Barcelona.

FEA from CAD without Meshing

FEA from CAD Without Meshing

To help you deliver groundbreaking products on time, Altair offers unique, proven technology breakthroughs to analyze fully-featured CAD assemblies in minutes, eliminating geometry simplification and meshing. With it, you can explore multiple design options – even for your project’s most complex parts and largest assemblies – at lightning speeds.

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Integrated Structural Engineering

Integrated Structural Engineering

Altair’s structural engineering solutions ensures your workflow productivity and data integrity with comprehensive data transfer links that manage data during consecutive import/export cycles with building information modeling (BIM) and CAD platforms. In addition, a streamlined workflow performs advanced structural analysis and code performance assessments for different building materials and local design codes.

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Unleashing the Power of Digital Wind

Unleashing the Power of Digital Wind

When constructing the world’s largest buildings, it’s imperative to consider the impact of wind pressures on the structure and on pedestrian comfort. Virtual wind tunnel testing is a mature technology that accurately models wind pressures, delivers rapid results, and lets designers explore and evolve concepts based on computational fluid dynamics (CFD) insights.

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Practice High-performance Design

Altair has developed a multi-disciplinary optimization workflow that helps clients understand structural performance sooner, accelerate design cycles, reduce costs, and validate designs virtually to minimize risk. High-performance design is a holistic, simulation-driven approach for developing safe, feasible, and robust structures.

Altair’s repeatable, customizable workflow combines wind loads with most advanced optimization techniques. Reduce the cost and time to deliver complex steel structures with automatic workflows that integrate all the major AEC structural solvers via direct link or neutral file formats, the power of size optimization for steel sections in 1D models, and topology optimization for 3D models to find the optimal load path.

Architectural firms around the world have adopted this collaborative, innovative approach, including Zaha Hadid Architects' study to generate a new structural and architectural expression for the Neue National Gallery in Berlin, Germany.

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Fast Alternative Design with Mesh-free Solver

AEC design cycles have two crucial requirements – product performance and timely delivery. Because of immense project pressures, there’s often insufficient time to investigate design alternatives or new solutions. Altair SimSolid™ is a technological breakthrough that lets civil engineers analyze fully featured CAD assemblies in minutes, eliminating geometry simplification and meshing. These insights allow engineers to foresee better alternatives in large structural models and evolve designs within existing project timelines. With SimSolid, design teams can perform multiple iterations of their most complex parts and explore multiple alternatives of large assemblies at blazing speed.

Case Study: Certified Panorama Thanks to Simulation


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Accurately analyze steel joints in 90 seconds with SimSolid.

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Integrated Structural Engineering

Altair’s structural engineering solutions ensure workflow productivity and data integrity with comprehensive data transfer links that manage data during consecutive import/export cycles with building information modeling (BIM) and CAD platforms. S-Frame's streamlined workflows let you perform advanced structural analysis and code performance assessments for different building materials and local design codes. S-Frame’s capabilities include:

Structural Analysis: Evaluate the effects of seismic, wind, static loads, moving loads, buckling, vibrations, and other loading conditions on a structure over time through advanced structural analysis capabilities.

Code Compliance: Comprehensive design solutions that ensure code-compliance and reporting to local design codes for steel, mass timber, reinforced concrete members, and building foundations.

Concrete Design: The ability to design and detail reinforced concrete and automatically check thousands of concrete structural elements designs at once. Produce detailed design reports that include clause references and intermediate results for regional design codes.

Mass Timber: The ability to efficiently model and analyze mass timber and hybrid structures, design timber elements and generate code-compliant design reports through a timber design solution that utilizes physical element modeling and automated meshing to save time while increasing accuracy.

Conference Presentation: Mass Timber Construction is the Future of Buildings


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Aerodynamic Insight from Design to Validation

CFD has become a powerful tool deployed throughout the AEC design workflow. For designers, concept-stage aerodynamic simulation helps shape designs to uphold the client’s vision while adhering to downstream performance targets.

Using digital wind tunnel testing, it’s now possible to investigate multiple design alternatives to determine feasibility and update shapes on the fly. For detailed validation in the latter stages of development, Altair CFD™ provides a granular understanding of aerodynamic phenomenon, mitigating risk, and ensuring safety and stability of the structure.

The Altair technology portfolio includes leading CFD tools that leverage both CPU-based Naiver-Stokes and GPU-based Lattice Boltzmann methods, letting clients select the best method to meet their project’s challenges and requirements.

Customer Story: Pedestrian Comfort Improvements on Quinta Torre with CFD


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Façade Engineering and Manufacturing

Modern façade system design requires a multi-disciplinary approach that supports all key aspects of façade engineering – structural engineering, thermal analysis, manufacturing, and protective design.

Structural Engineering: Altair’s technology streamlines structural integrity assessments, even for complex parts and large assemblies with hundreds of parts and bolts with pre-tensioning, weld lines, contacts, and friction, and has intuitive tools for both linear and non-linear analysis.

Thermal Analysis: Users can easily calculate energy consumption and thermal effects by leveraging Altair’s suite of CFD Tools.

Blast Simulation: Protective design simulation lets civil engineers predict the effects of blasts and explosions on critical structural systems.

Façade Manufacturing: Altair’s manufacturing feasibility software simulates part extrusion profiles, providing end-to-end solutions for façade development.

Featured Resources

Built for the Future - SOM Achieves Sustainability Objectives Through Innovative Design

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) is a renowned global architectural, urban planning, and engineering firm. Known for some of the world’s most technically and environmentally advanced buildings, SOM applies creativity and emerging technologies to design buildings for the future. SOM designed the new United States Courthouse in Downtown Los Angeles to be an open and transparent public space, while also constantly considering the materials used in the project and the project's environmental footprint. The structural design specialists at SOM used Altair OptiStruct to generate an ideal project plan that considered sustainable regulations and manufacturing constraints.

Customer Stories

Topology Optimization Improves Gondola Lift Station Building

In modern passenger transport systems, flawless operation, comfort, and safety are key engineering criteria for design. To guarantee these key performance indicators, demanding fatigue tests are performed to ensure a component’s performance and strength. Advanced simulation methods can help to achieve an optimal design and ensure that components meet even the highest safety requirements. Using Altair Inspire, Doppelmayr, a manufacturer of ropeways and innovative transportation systems for ski areas and urban areas, built a design that passed the safety test, and optimized the gondola station to be lighter, safer, and more durable than requested. More recently, Doppelmayr also started using Altair SimSolid™ to explore its designs and create structural efficient concepts for large models and complex assemblies.

Customer Stories

Mass Timber Construction – The Future is Here But Are We Ready? By Smith and Wallwork

Mass timber construction is the future of buildings – after all, there aren't many construction technologies that trap more carbon dioxide than they generate!

Conference Presentations

Certified Panorama Thanks to Simulation

When planning offices and foyers to showcase the hallmark values of their customers, many architects benefit from the open and inviting atmosphere of glass structures. Faraone, designer and manufacturer of such lightweight structures, used Altair solutions to analyze and redesign support structures for large-scale glass elements, which are the core business of the company. The results are topologically optimized and stiffer aluminum channels that can host the structural glass element. With cost reduction, shorter development times, and design efficiency, this use case from Faraone demonstrates the benefits of simulation technologies in accelerating product development.

Customer Stories
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