Performance Driven Generative Design – What is it and what is it used for?

In today’s increasingly competitive market, it is no longer sustainable to approach design slowly and methodically. Designers are faced with faster design cycles and more demanding design requirements. Their compositions must be lighter, cheaper, more aesthetic and more streamlined than the competition’s. They need to push past conventional ways of working to think innovatively – and quickly.

Until recently traditional design tool’s partiality impeded professionals. The traditional approach had mechanical engineers and designers think of a shape, or several shapes, that fit the design criteria, perhaps sketch them on paper and then detail the best shape with their CAD program.

This is where Performance Driven Generative Design comes in.

What is Performance Driven Generative Design?

Performance Driven Generative Design allows you to explore and validate designs through simulation, make informed decisions on weight reduction and optimized performance, and generate shapes that could not have been imagined using conventional design methods.

Not only will you benefit from a newfound freedom to take advantage of flexible design processes, but you will also have the advantage of a seamless alliance between design, simulation, and manufacturing. With no data loss through translation and speed and agility of design optimization and evaluation being multiplied – you will be able to create better products faster.

Even without simulation and optimization expertise, you will have the ability to set up and run generative design cycles yourself, creating lightweight components and achieving significant performance gains.

Key Performance – Driven Generative Design Pillars

Function-Driven Generative Design

Function-Driven Generative Design allows designers to capture all functional specifications. This includes not only geometrical inputs but also analysis inputs, optimisation targets and constraints.

The Generative aspect comes from the modelling reduction in this process. Concept shapes are generated from a simple push button to obtain an exact representation, and we can easily validate the structural behaviour of this concept.

With such a design study, designers can easily create, visualize, and compare different variants and their resulting KPIs to perform a trade-off and select the best concept. This workflow is also based on the manufacturing constraints defined upfront and handles Additive Manufacturing along with more traditional processes such as milling, cast and forge, and more.

While moving on to detailed design, as a designer, you will have at your disposal different sets of capabilities to assist you with the detailed modelling of the part, which can still easily be structurally validated before moving to manufacture.

Fluid Flow Generative Design

Fluid flow generative design allows designers to improve the efficiency of internal fluid systems by generating shapes that respect performance KPI targets, via a streamlined and intuitive workflow experience.

This will allow you to explore and generate shapes for internal fluid flows that minimize pressure drops and preserve the mass flow rate (HVAC, cabin comfort systems, etc.). Not only this, but you will also be able to generate automatically flow-driven shapes, validated with an easy set-up Navier-Stokes CFD simulations and promote a seamless collaboration between design and simulation departments.

In summary

Performance Driven Generative Design allows designers to explore and validate through simulation, and make informed decisions on weight reduction and performance gain. Optimized shapes that could not have been imagined using conventional design methods are now at your fingertips.

Find out more today about how you can utilise Performance Driven Generative Design, our 3DEXPERIENCE platform and CATIA on the cloud, to transform your design capabilities, and get in touch today.