introducing hexagon’s system dynamics centre of excellence

SectionSystem dynamics

Introducing Hexagon’s system dynamics centre of excellenceDelivering comprehensive system solutions to address the biggest dynamics and durability challenges for the next generation of engineering for smart manufacturing and sustainability

By Christopher Baker, SVP, Head of System Dynamics CoE, Hexagon MI, Design & Engineering

With the ever-increasing dependency on digital and electrical technology, engineers are facing ever more complicated new challenges in bringing products to market faster, better and more reliable than ever. Rapid developments within transportation and energy generation pose huge issues ranging from reliability of autonomous vehicles to ensuring more sustainable solutions for the future of the aerospace sector. Intense competitive and economic pressures are forcing design and manufacturing engineers to develop products with less dependence than ever before on physical prototyping. System simulation is key to realising success in this business environment and entails doing more CAE analysis up front and democratising the use of advanced engineering tools that empower users to collaborate better and overcome silos thus aiding organisations in bringing innovative products to market more efficiently in every respect.

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MSC Software and our parent company Hexagon have a long history of bringing such innovative technology solutions to customers’ fingertips. After numerous acquisitions over the years and the addition of Romax in 2020 we have formed what we call Centres of Excellence (CoE) inside the Design & Engineering Business Unit of Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence. These focused teams reflect the historical strengths of our acquired brands and together they allow us to deliver novel multi-physics, multi-fidelity system simulation technologies. We are streamlined to solve end-to-end challenges in particular domains yet retaining the flexibility to collaborate with each other. These CoEs work toward a common goal and provide MSC Software and Hexagon’s customers with comprehensive solutions to the industry’s biggest challenges facing modern manufacturing and the digital transformations facing us this century.

System Dynamics is one of seven CoEs inside MSC Software, focusing on the simulation of dynamic systems and consisting of several world-class software technologies with rich histories and formidable combined user bases: Romax, Adams, Easy5, SimDesigner, and our partner product family, FTire. Operating across the automotive, aerospace, renewable, robotics, and machinery industries, the System Dynamics CoE is aiming to empower the best companies in the market to conduct CAE-led design, development, and optimisation of their complex products. And it is not just our tools that we are bringing together, but also our people, as we unite a wealth of expertise in gears, bearings, electric machines, controls, and vehicle systems, underpinned by a proven world-leading Research & Innovation team.

Romax and Adams: two industry titans coming together

Acquired by Hexagon in 2020, Romax Technology has a long history for delivering innovation in powertrain simulation technology and engineering expertise and pioneering CAE for sustainability. For over 30 years, Romax has been helping customers design powertrains that meet challenging requirements for power density, efficiency, durability, and noise. More recently, many of our customers have come to us for

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our expertise in eMobility, looking for support as they electrify their products and we are a market leader in designing electric drivelines. Beyond the automotive realm, we have a strong cohort of customers in bearings, aerospace, and wind energy, where we are proud to hold the record for DNV-GL certified wind turbine gearbox designs. With products targeted at specific users, integrated within a single platform, our customers use our software solutions to solve a variety of problems. Starting from ‘pen and paper’ style conceptual designs, Romax enables transmission and electric powertrain designers to create and refine drivetrains using a model that can be created in minutes, and begin to answer questions like, “will it meet its targets for durability, efficiency, NVH, weight, packaging, cost?” And, if the answer is no, tackle the question early on of, “what can I do about it?” As more detail is added to a given model, analyses become more refined and further ‘what if?’ scenarios can be evaluated.

While Romax tools focus on the drivetrain, our market leading Adams technology has much broader applicability built up over 40 years, allowing for extended system simulation across a plethora of industries. Another

Electric vehicle drivetrain simulated in Romax

heavyweight of the CAE industry, the world’s most widely used multi-body dynamics (MBD) software solution, and a stalwart of the MSC portfolio, Adams has a rich history that includes enabling the landing of all the Mars rovers. Adams is a full system dynamics environment for simulation of any dynamic mechanical system and improves engineering efficiency while reducing product development costs by enabling early system-level design validation. Engineers can explore system concepts and evaluate performance, safety, and comfort, optimise configurations, predict loads for strength and durability, and combine controls and mechanical systems to understand both physical and behavioural aspects of the system. As development progresses, Adams is further leveraged as part of the digital thread to explore complexities related to transient phenomena. Adams is the de facto MBD industry standard in the automotive industry. It is widely used by vehicle designers, powertrain integrators and NVH experts to realise

industry-leading engineering solutions. Adams is used for valuable automotive engineering processes related to optimisation of vehicle and powertrain dynamics and it delivers confidence in drive quality and component durability. In effect, it can serve as a virtual platform for subsystem and system validation.

Put together, our System Dynamics CoE’s products allow engineering teams to accelerate development processes, reduce risk, save time and money, and improve product quality. Offering different approaches, Romax and Adams complement each other to form part of an integrated development process: Romax is an easy to use, fast component and sub-system design solution for developing multi-fidelity drivetrain models and answering ‘what if?’ questions up front, whilst Adams is a powerful, full-system dynamics environment ideal for answering more challenging questions later on in the design cycle.

Romax is a specialist application tool with a focus on the powertrain at varying levels of fidelity (from early concept simulation to detailed design validation), and Adams is a more general tool with numerous applications, perfectly positioned to allow in-depth analysis to optimise performance, durability, and NVH characteristics. Adams users have the flexibility to set up a model and simulate any aspect to a high level of detail, whereas Romax’s constraints help guide its users to do specific tasks with ease. All this being said, this is not simply a marriage of two simulation tools, but rather a combining of two different approaches to engineering design and simulation, creating a CoE that has the flexibility to deliver solutions to clients across the full process, from concept to detailing to sign-off.

Streamlining design and engineering processes

Our system dynamics tools reach their full potential when used to achieve process improvement. Adopting CAE-led processes reduces the cost associated with iterative prototype testing and improves confidence that the ultimate product will be fit for purpose and right-first-time in the eyes of the customer, regardless of the industry or application. Higher product quality and quicker time to market are two key advantages, and it is well documented that increasing CAE effort early on in the design saves a significant amount of time; for instance, Valeo recently reported a 7-9 month saving in their development process thanks to Romax software. De-risking innovation is another benefit we offer; developing innovative products requires, to some extent, a shift in prototyping from physical to virtual. Increasing CAE effort, and doing so


in a way which enables teams to work together and collaboratively, is key to enabling engineers to challenge the norm and design better and more innovative products.

With a spirit of collaboration, our System Dynamics CoE is aiming to break down organisational silos by connecting attribute teams and stakeholders to ensure they achieve their shared business goals through process innovation. All the way through from component to sub-system to full system design, our users work with managed workflows to enable collaboration and efficient working, both within and between departments to promote smart design and smart manufacturing decisions. Our comprehensive toolset allows users we believe to make informed engineering decisions early in the process, and to understand performance early, leading to higher quality, innovative products at shortened development times, and ultimately at reduced cost.

A conventional approach follows ‘design it all then simulate it all’. CAE-led processes use simulation to support the design with continuous design and validation cycles.

Part of a much bigger family

Marrying two such important tools in our industry as Romax and Adams, we are excited to see what our future together will hold. Certainly, there is scope to extend Romax’s frequency-domain approach for steady-state analysis of gear and electric machine NVH into the Adams realm for time-domain transient analysis of the whole powertrain (e.g. start-up, rapid changes, and stop events). We are currently working together to improve many forms of collaboration between our products. A first step in this journey was made several years ago, with Romax’s Dynamic Fusion product (which can transfer a simplified Romax model to Adams View with a basic geometry representation) and this will be furthered this year with the release of FMI support (adapting Romax models to time domain and exporting as an independent component for use in larger systems), so that Romax models can be used to feed into more extensive Adams simulation.

From our position within Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence, the System Dynamics CoE reaps the benefits of connecting with the other 6 CoEs within MSC Software, including synergies with our Structures team for structural FEA with MSC Nastran, Marc and CAEfatigue, and with Actran for acoustic simulation, among others. In our CoE we pride ourselves on strong multi-fidelity, multi-physics workflows that often feature products from other class-leading technologies under the MSC Software umbrella, and we are looking to expand our links to other areas of Hexagon as well that has enormous amounts of sensor and software technologies built up over the last 20 years. Our System Dynamics CoE technologies enable the creation of virtual digital twins of our user’s product which follow the development process from clean-sheet design through production and beyond to ensure that there is traceability and a feedback loop


Embedded Actran Acoustic Simulation in Romax Spectrum

Author Profile

Chris Baker is Senior Vice President, Software Products and Head of the System Dynamics Center of Excellence at MSC Software, part of Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence. In that capacity, he leads product strategy, development, and go-to-market execution for the highly strategic Adams and Romax product families, driving progress in the multi-physics, multi-fidelity system simulation arena. Before assuming this role in 2020, he served as the Senior Vice President, Software Products at Romax Technology, where he reengineered crucial business processes and guided his team through the ideation and development of a new product platform. Chris has extensive leadership experience in the global CAE and automotive markets, having also held senior business development, product management, and engineering roles at Mechanical Simulation, MSC Software, and Ford Motor Company over the past 20 years. He is passionate about delivering solutions that are innovative, process-oriented, and fit for purpose, and constantly seeks to partner with other best-in-class software teams and thought-leaders to deliver on Hexagon’s promise to its customers and the engineering world. A licensed Professional Engineer, Chris holds a BSE in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University and MSE and MBA degrees from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and its Ross School of Business.

Christopher K. Baker, P.E., SVP, Head of System Dynamics CoE, Hexagon MI


that informs future development and makes your organisation more agile. Working with other divisions of Hexagon will allow us to further our vision of a complete digital thread that follows a product through its complete lifecycle and even into recycling in the emerging circular economy of the 21st century.

Beyond the realms of Hexagon, System Dynamics has been nurturing a powerful open partner ecosystem for many years. We work with over 100 partners, from academic institutions to gold-standard software tools: VI-Grade for vehicle dynamics and NVH simulation, Gamma Technologies and Maplesoft for multi-physics systems simulation, Motor Design Limited and JMAG for electromagnetic

FEA, modeFRONTIER and SmartUQ for process integration and design optimisation, Autodesk and PTC for 3D CAD geometry, Klingelnberg and Gleason for gear simulation, SKF and Timken for bearing simulation, and many more, including several to be announced in 2021. This has great benefit to our customers, who can enjoy seamless workflows and integrated processes between the very best specialist tools available. It is also tremendously beneficial to us, as we tap into the very best knowledge and embedded expertise that the market has to offer and expand our own solutions.

In 2021, both Adams and Romax will see significant new releases, with brand new user workflows and

opportunities for collaboration. We will be sharing more details throughout the coming months, and particularly at our inaugural Hexagon LIVE Design & Engineering 2021 event (October 12-14), where industry thought leaders and System Dynamics customers across a wide range of industries will illustrate how our solutions help to make them successful. Whether it is at the event or at another point of the year, we hope to connect with you soon. We’re very excited to be embarking on this the next chapter of our journey with you, and cannot wait to explore how we can work together to further improve the landscape of engineered systems and create CAE for smart manufacturing and a more sustainable future for us all.

System Dynamics


introducing hexagon’s system dynamics centre of excellence

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