Altair
The Lightweight Aircraft Innovator

The commercial aerospace industry is rapidly expanding due to the rebound in global economy and rising demand for air travel. With factors like carbon footprint and resource efficiency increasingly becoming industry concerns, it has become critical for aerospace manufacturers to deliver lightweight and brilliantly designed aircrafts. Bringing its expertise of using optimization technology to meet aerospace industry’s unique engineering and design challenges by delivering minimum weight aircrafts is Altair. The company has been instrumental in pioneering the establishment of Optimization Centers at major aerospace Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs).

Altair’s ProductDesign service brings extensive experience in overcoming the aerospace industry’s unique engineering and design challenges through simulation driven design expertise, delivering significant value to the world’s leading aerospace OEMs. “Altair was founded with the vision to build a company based on strong core values and philosophies on integrity and honesty and striving to bring great technology,” says James Scapa, Chairman and CEO, Altair. Being one of the few companies focused on topology optimization, Altair develops high fidelity finite element models to facilitate predictive virtual testing including wings, engines, and aircraft interiors. In addition, it has simulated and successfully worked against vulnerability events such as bird strikes, tire bursts, ditching, passenger safety, and impacts.

Founded in 1985, Altair started as an engineering services consulting company applying computer simulation to structure analysis and eventually expanded into simulation, while focusing on optimization technology—wrapping optimization tools around simulation. “Today, we continue to add capabilities to our software portfolio for new types of simulation, focusing on high performance,” says Scapa. The company’s bone-based software is used for optimizing the design of millions of aircrafts and automotive vehicles.

We continue to add capabilities to our software portfolio for new types of simulation, focusing on high performance

Based on finite-element and multi-body dynamics technology, as well as advanced analysis and optimization algorithms, OptiStruct helps designers and engineers rapidly develop innovative, lightweight, and structurally efficient designs.

Altair’s Weight Analytics (WA) solution manages the entire Weight and Balance (W&B) process, empowering engineering and management teams to control and ensure W&B attributes meet program requirements. Deployed as a common weight management tool across the enterprise, WA enables faster and more accurate decision-making with on-demand access to visualize, analyze, and predict W&B at any point in time during the entire product lifecycle. It dramatically reduces the time required to consolidate data sources by up to 80 percent. For instance, Airbus Helicopters develops civil and military helicopter solutions for its customers that serve, protect, save lives, and safely carry passengers in highly demanding environments. The company wanted to create an automatically updating standardized weight analytics reporting tool that would reduce data redundancy. Upon implementing Altair’s Weight Analytics solution, Airbus Helicopters was able to reduce data consolidation time by 80 percent with increased data consistency.

Altair’s culture is to thrive on seeking out business and technology to radically change the way organizations design products. Being focused on the development and simulation technology to synthesize and optimize designs, processes, and decisions for clients’ business performance, Altair has set a legacy of its own.

Driven by simulation, decision making engineering, and optimization, today, Altair continues to pave its way toward innovation by combining the three key components with HPC and cloud architecture to help clients achieve the desired business outcome. “Our intent is to continuously push the boundaries of HPC to pursue exascale computing through active participation in the HPC community,” concludes Scapa.