ALTAIR’S TECHNOLOGY FOR AEC GOES back a pretty long way, and in the first decade of this century, we got to know the company through its acquisition of Italy’s solidThinking, Inc. We were already familiar with the Italian software company because, at the time, it was one of just a few CAID (computer-aided industrial design) software systems for both Mac OS X and Windows.
Altair was already a global leader in CAE (computer-aided engineering) software, but as Bob Little, who became solidThinking’s president after the acquisition, said in 2008, “we studied the market and saw that design studios were a special type of place in the product development world.” Noting that C-level executives often had dedicated parking spots outside design studios, the sheer amount of time they could spend there was already well-noted in Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs.
I think with the current speed of innovation and client demands—with the desire to create the most iconic structures with the most energy-efficiency—the dichotomy between the creative and the mathematical cannot be maintained anymore.
The more significant point was, Altair made a vital connection long ago of how critical it was to tie the conceptual design segment of product development to the engineering side. Hence, the acquisition of solidThinking and the continued focus on bringing high-fidelity engineering technology workflows into the early design process.
“I think with the current speed of innovation and client demands—with the desire to create the most iconic structures with the most energy-efficiency—the dichotomy between the creative and the mathematical cannot be maintained anymore,” says Luca Frattari, Ph.D., Vice President, AEC Global Business, Altair. So it goes then that a central tenet of Altair’s overall philosophy has been to find ways to bring high-fidelity mathematically intensive engineering analysis upfront to the design phase.
“We are focused on providing engineers with the tools that make their lives easier, faster, empowering them with optimization tools… On the other hand, we also talk to the architects about the other side, about the simulation tools we have, so they can investigate a freeform design—which is always very hard to understand where the loads come down,” says Frattari. “If you are an architect doing a shape like that, you are unsure where the loads go.”
Pre-Greta Thunberg
After Altair acquired solidThinking and its tools, the company launched a landmark release in solidThinking Inspire 8.0 in 2009, which incorporated its new ‘morphogenesis’ technology, which shipped as an additional module to the base product. It was early Altair optimization technology, and our hero image for our feature article focused on stadium design, a subject of Frattari’s Ph.D. dissertation.
Dr. Frattari’s Ph.D. work focused on stadia design. In this image, loads are applied to a schematic design section. In the next image below you will see morphogenesis technology at work. (click on images for larger views) (Image: Altair Technologies / Architosh. All rights reserved.)
At Architosh, we quickly noted that Altair’s morphogenesis technology could help design efficient and lightweight structures. “Light-weighting designs,” as we sometimes termed it, could save companies millions on transport or fuel or both, including buildings. Altair’s folks noted the positive environmental impacts to industries like aerospace, architecture, ground vehicles, and medical implants back when Greta Thunberg was just six years old.
The same stadia section is now altered through Altair’s topology optimization technology, arriving at “critical mass” reduction, efficient load pathfinding, and shape finding. (Image: Altair Technologies / Architosh. All rights reserved.)
In many ways, from our perspective, Altair was a decade ahead of rivals in the AEC CAD world, who now talk about tools that do what the morphogenesis technology was doing a long time ago. Altair’s engineers took algorithms that scientists created that simulated nature’s reaction to environmental forces—such as those that shaped bone growth in humans and animals. And they applied them to man-made objects. The term morphogenesis has over the years given away to a more general industry term in ‘topology optimization,’ but the goal is the same: create structures with minimum mass and maximum stiffness.
Lighter structures with smaller mass generally are more energy-efficient and more carbon-friendly. Less-weight, less material means less fuel in transport and production.
Inspire and Architecture: A Brief History
When solidThinking Inspire 8.5 came out in 2011 in the spring, the company had advanced its topology optimization (still called morphogenesis back then) so that individual parts of a model could receive topological optimization or not. Architosh covered this feature in detail around a bridge and chair design. (see image below) By the time version 9.5 came out in 2013, we had noted that its CAID-oriented modeling powers could target that segment of the architecture modeling market seeking more freeform design where there was increasing demand and a small field of capable providers.
Inspire 8.5. had key advancements in isolating topological optimization in specific areas of a model assembly, as shown here in this bridge design where the focus is on the supports under the roadway model.
However, that Rhino-kind of modeling space wasn’t where the company seemed to be oriented. Instead, Altair was at AIA Denver in 2013, where Frattari was talking up their work targeting the SOM’s of the world—and literally SOM of Chicago. The fabled global architecture giant used Altair’s finite element analysis (FEA) software in the early stages of design to provide rapid feedback on very tall structures. This application of FEA in AEC today remains a powerful vector for Altair’s growth with architects and structural engineers. (more on that later).
SOM has been a long client of Altair’s technologies, including FEA analysis tools today commonly used for studying wind forces on tall buildings. (Altair Technologies / Architosh. All rights reserved.)
While Altair continued to find traction with large firms like SOM, Architosh itself looked at solidThinking Evolve (not Inspire) in 2013 to exploit its capacity as an advanced modeler with a powerful history tree. Moreover, it ran on Mac and Windows equally, whereas the only CAID-oriented tool directed successfully at the AEC market was the Windows-oriented Rhino 3D. Our modeling feature showcased Gehry-like building surfaces beautifully rendered in metallic-like surfaces. While the article closed with an image of the Gherkin in London by Foster + Partners, Altair didn’t push in this direction, a direction that could have seen it threaten McNeel’s Rhino in AEC.
Instead, Altair, from the mid-decade on and from our eyes, continued to focus on bringing FEA, CFD, and topology optimization to high-fidelity engineering challenges by big-name and marquee architects.
Today Altair has been doing stunning work with firms like SOM and Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) which provides Altair key feedback on the evolution of their software technologies for early-stage design development. (more after the jump)
Altair’s Latest Advancements
It has been five years since our last major feature on Altair. Dr. Frattari spent a good hour catching me up on where Inspire technology is today and what other products and technologies the engineering software company has aimed at the larger AEC technology market.
Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) is another longtime client of Altair’s engineering software, with results shown here such as the studded pavilion at the Morpheus Hotel in the City of Dreams project. (Image: ZHA via Altair Corporation / Architosh. All rights reserved.)
Elite design firms are still utilizing topology optimization software with demanding form-making problems. Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) used Altair software for developing its triangles studded pavilion for the Morpheus Hotel in the City of Dreams. The marquee architecture practice also tapped Altair’s HyperWorks platform for its 2015 competition entry for the 2015 Museum of the 20th Century in Berlin, adjacent to Mies van der Rohe’s Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany.
We believe that clients reach the peak of performance improvements when they engage these kinds of workflows at the start of conceptual design.
ZHA’s computation and design research group (co|de) led the effort to produce a workflow from HyperWorks to OptiStruct and back again, creating a structure that was easier to fabricate. The overall results of that work were quite stunning, with material redundancies eliminated and weight reduction in concrete achieved with intelligent and efficient rib patterns.
Altair’s topology optimization technologies have continued to advance over the past five years, with new abilities to model geometric-based forms over “morphogenesis-looking” optimizations directly. Altair’s OptiStruct algorithms for topology optimization have permanently been embedded in Inspire since version 8.0 but at graduated levels of capability. Inspire includes technologies from other Altair product ranges and can be used for “design for additive manufacturing” (DfAM) plus more advanced topology optimizations.
An engineering analysis of ZHAs Berlin Museum competition entry. The heat map colors indicate stresses in the organic morphological form of the concrete floors and columns. (Image: ZHA via Altair Corporation / Architosh. All rights reserved.)
Beyond topology optimizations, Altair is helping architects design tall buildings better with CFD (computational fluid dynamics) analysis for wind force design. Firms like Fenwick Iribarren Architects to SOM use tools like Altair AcuSolve and HyperMesh to solve wind-disturbance and structural issues at the ground level and tower level of skyscrapers. SOM has also used Altair OptiStruct to develop material efficiencies for its LA courthouse project.
ZHA’s Museum of the 20th Century in Berlin, near Mies van der Rohe’s famous landmark, an interior view showcasing the organic morphological form of the structural floors and columns, all topologically optimized using Altair’s engineering software technologies. (Image: ZHA via Altair Corporation / Architosh. All rights reserved.)
Another exciting use of Altair technologies is in innovative composites for organic architecture. In 2018, designers and architects in Austria, working with the Institute of Architecture, University of Applied Arts Vienna, developed wood-carbon composite materials. Thin plies of wood veneers with plies of carbon fiber can be formed into various free-form shapes and curves and address complex, heavy loading patterns.
Altair’s HyperWorks suite and mainly its ESAComp tool for laminate design and analysis were brought together in the wood-carbon laminates, first proposed for the new Bulgarian Varna Library Facade and later for the Sella Chair technology demonstration.
The “Greta Effect”
Swedish teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg didn’t step onto the internal stage until 2018, but by 2019 the so-called “Greta Effect” was in full force. A more engaged and hardened push for addressing climate change emerged. More companies are turning to Altair’s technologies that help drive down the material mass and carbon footprints for production and attendant transportation.
Finding ways to design higher-strength but lighter material formations for building everything from cars to buildings and bridges is critical to lowering the carbon footprint of large industries like AEC and manufacturing. To achieve these goals faster, Dr. Frattari encourages not just the adoption of higher-fidelity engineering workflows like FEA, CFD, and topology optimization science and engineering but bringing these advances earlier in the design phase.
ZHA’s Museum of the 20th Century in Berlin, near Mies van der Rohe’s famous landmark, utilized Altair’s HyperWorks platform for a total workflow of topology optimization at the highest fidelity level possible. It led to this stunning architectural achievement for its competition entry. (Image: ZHA via Altair Corporation / Architosh. All rights reserved.).
“We believe that clients reach the peak of performance improvements when they engage these kinds of workflows at the start of conceptual design,” he says. To get Altair’s technology more embedded into a larger userbase of AEC industry engineers—and go beyond advanced engineering and computation and research groups in marquee global design firms like ZHA and SOM—the company recently acquired S-FRAME.
The Canada-based structural engineering software company offers complete solutions across every structural building material and fabrication method. Dr. Frattari says, “we are working on harnessing optimization via full interoperability to bring our solution into the many stages of the design workflow.”
Final Analysis
Altair’s acquisition of S-FRAME firmly places the company in the AEC software industry like never before. This will enable a range of Altair technologies to reach typical buildings similar to elite architectural projects by marquee architecture firms. This expansion is a positive step for the company as more pressure on AEC professionals puts zero-carbon design goals on their radar.
Additional Notes
To learn more about Altair and its AEC Technologies go here.
Image Credits
Format equates to “party with copyright” / “party with reserved rights of use.” (eg: image: Epic Games, Inc. / Architosh. All rights reserved.)
Title image credit: ( © Zaha Hadid Architects for Altair Technologies / Architosh. All rights reserved.) Non-credited images are copyrighted to Architosh. All other images are copyrighted, as noted in the image credits.