Manufacturing

Unlock Product Development Performance and Flexibility With NVIDIA RTX

Conjugate heat transfer of a launch vehicle fuel-oxidizer injector using OpenFOAM

Objective

With the HP ZBook Studio and ZBook Fury mobile workstations powered by NVIDIA RTX A5500, discover how M4 Engineering tackled complex product design and engineering simulations while working from any location.

Customer

M4 Engineering Inc.

Partner

HP Inc.

Use Case

Simulation / Modeling / Design

Products

NVIDIA RTX

Advanced Performance and Flexibility for Product Development Workflows

Founded in 2001, the organization combines state-of-the-art software development with expertise in multidisciplinary design, analysis, and optimization. M4 Engineering focuses on the entire spectrum of disciplines, including structural mechanics, biomechanics, heat transfer, aerodynamics, trajectory, cost, aeroheating, fluid mechanics, and controls.

The M4 Engineering team specializes in design, analysis and optimization of complex high-performance systems typically found in electric aircraft, eVTOL, urban air mobility, as well as more conventional aircraft and spacecraft. M4 Engineering addresses the complicated challenges associated with weight prediction, rotor dynamics, and vehicle optimization.

The team at M4 Engineering utilizes a variety of 3D design and simulation applications for the needs of the project and their customers. For CAD, the team primarily uses Siemens NX for large assemblies containing hundreds to thousands of parts, as well as SOLIDWORKS. For structural simulations, the team uses Siemens Simcenter 3D, Ansys Mechanical, and Dassault Systèmes SIMULIA Abaqus. For computational fluid dynamics, the team relies on GPU-accelerated applications such as Siemens Simcenter STAR-CCM+ and FUN3D.

To further enhance workflows, the engineers at M4 were looking for solutions that provided increased flexibility and mobility—whether working from the office or a remote location—without compromising on hardware performance. Using the HP ZBook Studio and ZBook Fury mobile workstations powered by NVIDIA RTX A5500™, the team at M4 was able to boost engineering workflows, increase efficiency while running multiple computationally-heavy engineering applications, and tackle complex programs and designs while working from anywhere.

Image courtesy of M4 Engineering Inc.
Simulation of a human torso exposed to underwater explosion

Image courtesy of M4 Engineering Inc.
External aerodynamics of a launch vehicle in hypersonic flight using FUN3D

Remotely Tackling 3D Models and Simulations

The team at M4 handles the design of large systems and sub-systems which consist of thousand of parts requiring massive simulations. At the same time, the engineers need freedom of mobility while embedded at customer sites, remote locations and manufacturing and test facilities. This led M4 Engineering to look for technologies that could address their needs while lowering total costs and accelerating schedules for the design and build processes.

At M4, the ability to quickly iterate designs is incredibly important. The team has found that they can achieve better designs faster when they're able to finalize details for shapes, materials, or arrangement within their designs earlier in the design process. They wanted technologies that could speed up simulations on GPUs, so that the engineers can deliver faster results. By using GPUS they are able to run more simulations faster leading to greater insights and design iterations in less time.

"We have found that the key to improving our designs is to provide our engineers tools that enable rapid iteration, and a modern engineer’s primary tool is their computing device," said Brian Rotty, senior engineer with M4 Engineering. "Having a fast, powerful computer directly translates to faster and tighter cycles for planning, analyzing, implementation, and evaluation. If more iterations can be tested, then we can find more optimal solutions."

Additionally, M4 Engineering was looking to expand the type and size of calculations that can be offloaded to the GPU. They wanted to improve their users’ multi-app workflow capabilities to enable significant background processing of various datasets, while still maintaining good performance for real-time applications. This would allow engineers to iterate their design in the foreground while analysis and evaluation occur in the background without worrying about hindering performance.

The HP ZBook Fury with the NVIDIA RTX A5500 enables this type of multi-app workflow while maintaining smooth, responsive interfaces, and allowing users to handle larger CAD assemblies and analyses.

Image courtesy of M4 Engineering Inc.
Simulation of a human torso exposed to underwater explosion

Powerful Performance On the Go

The HP ZBook Studio and ZBook Fury mobile workstations powered by NVIDIA RTX A5500 GPU enabled the M4 Engineering team to tackle intense workloads in a lightweight, sleek mobile workstation—while working from anywhere. Using the workstations powered by NVIDIA RTX, M4 engineers effortlessly handled heavy multi-app 3D workflows, rendering, simulation, data analysis, and visualization on the go.

The ZBook Studio delivers advanced visual computing anywhere in a thin and light form factor. And the ZBook Fury offers HP’s highest-end mobile workstation performance. The RTX-powered HP mobile workstations offer increased performance, speed, and flexibility to the M4 Engineering teams for running graphics and computationally intense software applications. This makes it easier for users to perform conceptual, detailed and industrial design, analysis, and simulation with an emphasis on structures, aerodynamics, flight performance and dynamics, and loads and vibration.

The NVIDIA RTX A5500 is the topmost professional NVIDIA GPU for mobile workstations, delivering the performance, reliability, and features required for demanding multi-application workflows. This allows users to tackle the most demanding graphics and computational workloads on mobile workstations, and with the large memory capacity and performance gains of NVIDIA RTX, teams can freely work on 3D models and simulations without worrying about the size of the datasets .

“The NVIDIA RTX A5500 GPU, packaged by HP in a thoughtful and well-built form-factor, has improved our productivity and unlocked workflows that were impractical only a short time ago,” Mr. Rotty said. “Coupled with tons of RAM and an array of blazing fast NVMe SSDs, our workstations now rival server-class hardware while allowing our team to work from customer sites, from home, and on the go as needed. We have yet to tackle an engineering problem that can’t be augmented – or handled outright — by the ZBook Fury with RTX A5500.”

Taking Advanced Visual Computing to the Next Level

The NVIDIA RTX A5500 extends the capabilities of engineering simulation through the design process with accelerated real-time structural, thermal, and fluid flow analysis software tools. The powerful GPU enables the team to work effortlessly with massive datasets and large assemblies in CAD, and they can easily tackle complex, multi-app product development workflows efficiently.

“The NVIDIA RTX A5500 GPU allows me to perform large-scale CUDA-accelerated fluid dynamics simulations in a fraction of the time using only my personal workstation,” said Edward Szwabowski, Senior Aerodynamics Engineer at M4 Engineering. “The multi-app product development workflows we use at M4 are well-served by the NVIDIA RTX A5500 and its large memory. My team can handle larger CAD and CAE datasets than before and, critically, we can interact with and iterate these larger datasets simultaneously by making use of the extra GPU memory headroom and compute capabilities of this new card.”

The HP ZBook Studio is the fastest general-purpose computer the team has ever used. They thought the real-time CAD performance of the GPU was impressive, and the ZBook Studio was able to handle the largest CAD assemblies they could dig up.

The ZBook Fury delivered extremely fast day-to-day performance, with responsive user interfaces in Windows 10, even under heavy load. Dan Hammerand, principal investigator for R&D at M4 Engineering, said, "The HP ZBook Fury workstation laptop provides outstanding performance for engineering model development and simulation. Compared to a standard workstation laptop, it provides a 2X speed-up, even for complex simulations." This enabled quicker model debugging, faster trade studies, and the ability to run larger models.

M4 Engineering works on designs that affect safety, reliability, and performance of real-world products in the public and private sector. With the HP Fury and RTX A5500, the teams can gain additional insights and optimizations to enhance the designs of these real-world products.