ThinKing January 2019 - Always one step ahead: Smart development platform for game changers

29.01.2019

Reduce the time-to-market und be able to produce optimised and better products for your costumers.

Accelerated Innovation GmbH provides a platform which offers businesses a fully digitalised process chain. This enables companies to stay one step ahead in their development work as the results from simulations or optimisations can be fed back directly to the platform where they can be accessed – including by partners – across companies. As a result, the time-to-market is reduced enormously. A benefit for lightweight technology: Optimisation potentials can be exploited in full from the very start. Additionally, a fully digitalised process chain also enables interactions between several iteration loops to make further improvements.

The Development Agency for Lightweighting Baden-Württemberg presents this innovation in the January 2019 edition of the ThinKing. Leichtbau BW GmbH uses this label to showcase excellent lightweight technology products or services from Baden-Württemberg every month.

“Our platform is a bit like a time machine. It lets you stay one step ahead and run through various future development scenarios. The fact is that, if you know what the final outcome will be, you can take it into account in the decisions you make now,” says Christian Ludwig, Accelerated Innovation’s GmbH Marketing Manager. The platform developed by the start-up from Hechingen provides other companies with a way of making full use of the potentials offered by a fully digitalised process chain. At the end of the day it all comes down to one thing: speed. “By using our platform customers can save time and money, boost their productivity and consequently offer their customers better products. Ultimately this means that even small companies can hold their own with the big players.” Ludwig draws on an example to explain how it works: “A digital twin of a part is placed on the platform. We then use this duplicate of the real part to offer various simulations and optimisations – which is much faster than it would be when you a test a real part and build a prototype with all the sending back and forth of the part” says Ludwig.

Shorter time-to-market – with better products

The results then flow back directly and securely as new data to the platform. As Ludwig explains, “the advantage is that the lengthy and time-consuming process of exchanging data between various businesses can also be avoided as everything is standardised via the platform”. There is no longer the routine need to wait for data and the platform also ensures that all the intermediary development steps are documented with legal certainty and can be traced back at any time. “Whatever it is you’re doing – recording data from various sources, simulating and optimising, returning revised design data after simulation or big-data-based analysis – with our platform we can offer customers all these processes along the entire development chain,” says Ludwig. “It is also about improving the manufacturing process, as production settings and conditions are also included in the simulation”. Another advantage of working with digital twins is the ability to offer a high level of product customisation. This makes producing one piece series cost effective.

Exploiting the potential of lightweight technology

“The complex simulations and feedback loops which lightweight construction requires depend on digitalisation. A fully digitalised process chain can leverage the entire optimisation potential during product development – especially if lightweight technology has been taken into account from the beginning of the development process,” says Dr. Wolfgang Seeliger, Managing Director of Leichtbau BW GmbH. In this case, for example, it is now possible to achieve 20 iteration loops in just two days rather than a mere three in six weeks. Lightweight technology not only makes products lighter, it also makes them better and more efficient,” continues Seeliger. “Optimised lightweight products weigh less which means that customers benefit as the motors in machines, for example, can be built smaller and consume less energy because they have to move less mass,” explains Seeliger.

Lightweight technology is a huge facilitator in many practical fields. A good example is the smart ILO1 electric car built by Emm! Solutions GmbH. If it hadn’t been for lightweight technology, the vehicle would never have been approved for road use in the lightweight L7e category for which the “magic” limit is 450 kilograms. The latest model of the lightweight vehicle concept car will be on show at the Hannover Messe for the first time at the “Lightweight Technologies from Baden-Württemberg” joint stand in Hall 5, C18. The ILO was developed with a PLM from Cassini Systems Europe GmbH, one of the three companies which founded Accelerated Innovation GmbH.

About Accelerated Innovation GmbH

The joint venture was founded by Cassini Systems Europe GmbH, INTEC International GmbH and Mind Venture AG. The three founders first met up in a project group working on additive manufacturing and digital product development run by the Development Agency for Lightweighting Baden-Württemberg. In 2018, nine companies from this project group set up a demonstrator for the Hannover Messe. Visitors to the “Lightweight Technologies from Baden-Württemberg” joint stand were able to watch live while a sleigh was customised to a person’s individual weight in a matter of seconds (see the video here: www.youtube.com/watch.

The group received a great deal of encouragement for the demonstrator and numerous inquiries from visitors of the exhibition signalising their interest in such a solution. The spirit of the Hannover Messe lived on after the event and the idea of setting up a company which could make a digitalised process chain available as a service for other companies was born. “Now our platform enables anyone to become a game changer,” says Christian Ludwig. Accelerated Innovation GmbH was founded in August and will also be present in Hanover as an exhibitor at the joint stand “Lightweight Technologies from Baden-Württemberg” in Hall 5, C18.

More information about the joint stand is available at:

https://www.leichtbau-bw.de/en/aktuelles/news/detail-view/article/become-a-game-changer-with-smart-lightweight-solutions-from-baden-wuerttemberg.html

A press kit with information on all 14 exhibitors and their innovative lightweight solutions is also available for download at the same link.