Completing simulation early and often in the design process is critical to keeping costs down. By completing these tasks, organizations can reduce the number of costly physical prototypes that need to be created and can increase productivity by catching potential issues earlier in the design process.

Completing simulation early and often in the design process is key to increasing productivity and reducing costs.

Although design and simulation should go hand in hand during the creative process, they are typically handled by different types of software and, as a result, are often treated as separate processes within organizations and possibly even by separate teams. Regardless, separating these processes slows things down, costing more time and more money, which ultimately slows down time to market and long-term lifetime product revenue.

PTC and Ansys Integration: Combine Design and Simulation for Optimized Products

Until now, there wasn’t a single product that could handle both the design and simulation processes. Instead, companies had to work between disparate platforms, importing and exporting designs to complete simulations and then make appropriate design changes.

PTC recognized this issue and, as a result, partnered with simulation company Ansys to integrate its state of the art simulation tools into the PTC Creo platform. Ansys is known for its groundbreaking simulation technology that helps designers and engineers turn their ideas into innovative products faster and at lower costs. Currently, Creo includes many of the Ansys Discovery Live capabilities, and PTC plans to increase the number of integrated features with each new version of Creo.

Creating Digital Twins for Improved Simulation

The PTC Creo and Ansys integration allows engineers to create digital twins of products. According to Forbes, a digital twin is a virtual model of a process, product, or service. It pairs together virtual and physical worlds through simulation to:

  • Support improved data analysis
  • Make it possible to predict problems before they occur
  • Prevent operational downtime
  • Develop new opportunities
  • Plan for the future

In manufacturing specifically, digital twins help engineers understand how products and parts will perform in the real world. By using digital twins, teams can complete simulations and immediately pinpoint potential failures and weaknesses, making it possible to make design changes before time and money have been invested into prototyping or field testing.

Digital twins pair virtual and physical worlds to improve product development through simulation and analysis.

Digital Twins and IoT

The concept and use of digital twins can also be applied to the Internet of Things (IoT) to:

  • Design and develop operational processes
  • Quickly diagnose performance issues
  • Eliminate bottlenecks or other holdups that slow down time-to-market and increase costs

The Benefits of Simulation Design

This integrated solution provides users with a single environment to complete modeling static structural, thermal, and modal simulations in real-time. Engineers can use the real-time results of simulation during the modeling process, which helps them to understand the necessary design changes needed in their models. This capability has the potential to dramatically improve engineering productivity and quality.

Simulation allows engineering to identify and fix problems earlier in the design process before investments have been made into physical prototypes.

By combining Creo and Ansys Discovery Live, organizations can:

  • Improve time to market
  • Reduce costs
  • Improve the quality of existing products
  • Eliminate potential problems

Create Better Products with Improved Design Simulation

This product integration truly pushes the PTC Creo product line ahead of the other 3D CAD competitors. With a combined design and simulation platform, engineers can address potential problems before they cause real issues, which significantly speeds up the design process and reduces costs.

Ready to revolutionize your design and simulation processes with a single integrated platform? Contact us.