Pepi Maksimovic on how Ansys is helping customers achieve their sustainability goals

Climate Action caught up with Pepi Maksimovic on how Ansys is delivering innovative solutions, helping customers achieve their sustainability goals.

What are some of the recent sustainability trends you have seen across different sectors and industries? 

Growing the use of carbon-free energy is a significant lever in combating greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Because energy production and use of energy by various industry segments account for a large share of global GHG emissions, a reliable delivery of clean and affordable energy is imperative for decarbonizing other industry sectors. To that end, deployment and scaleup of renewable, hydropower, and nuclear energy solutions has been accelerating. The drive to improve energy consumption efficiency is ongoing across all sectors, from energy, manufacturing, to high-tech and consumer products.  

Electrification has taken off across many industry sectors, driving the need for continuous R&D in the areas of electric motors, batteries, electronics, system integration, advanced materials, and more. 

Hydrogen has emerged as a promising solution for both energy delivery and storage. It creates carbon-free energy when burned, so the transportation and hard-to-abate manufacturing sectors view it as an attractive alternative to fossil fuels. There have been substantial efforts around scaling up production of green hydrogen, improving the safety of transport and storage, as well as developing hydrogen utilization technologies like direct hydrogen combustion and fuel cells.  

Focusing on making smart material choices that improve sustainability as well as to comply with environmental regulations has emerged as a significant trend. Also trending is the use of carbon capture technology – whether based on point-source capture or direct-air capture – to improve capture efficiency, reduce energy consumption, and drive down cost. Other cross-industry trends include a focus on product lightweighting, improving product reliability and durability, and utilization of advanced manufacturing technologies, such as 3D printing, automation, digital twins, and computation, among others. At Ansys, we see companies from virtually every industry using computer simulation to help meet their sustainability goals. 

How have some of these trends reshaped product development? 

As mentioned earlier, multiple industries have been pursuing electrification as a pathway for decarbonization, from ground and air transportation, energy production, to manufacturing, which has led to a proliferation of power electronics, sensors, controls, and embedded software. These, in turn, often lead to an increase in complexity of the overall technical solutions because a much wider spectrum of scenarios that may affect performance need to be considered, such as reliability of power delivery, power consumption, electromagnetic interference, signal integrity, connectivity, cybersecurity, and others. For these reasons, product developers need to thoroughly evaluate and ensure proper thermal, structural, electrical, and other performance options of each component and subsystem, as well as desired performance of the overall system. The use of multiphysics engineering simulation software over the duration of the product development cycle enables designers and engineers to efficiently perform sweeps across a possible design space over a range of operating points. Simulation helps product design and development teams assess risk due to uncertainties and perform trade-off studies in order to identify the optimal design candidate that meets desired performance, cost, and time targets. The best engineering practices nowadays deploy model-based systems engineering (MBSE), which ensures proper system integration and performance by enabling full understanding of dependencies across subsystems and combines multiple engineering disciplines along with their models of varying orders of complexities.    

Another major influence reshaping product development has been the addition of environmental impact as an important design criterion, in addition to normative criteria such as technical performance, time, and cost targets. Improving the environmental performance of a product requires an understanding of the environmental impacts across the product life cycle. A significant percentage of product-related environmental impact is “locked in” during the design phase through choices of materials and manufacturing methods. Thus, materials and manufacturing decisions are critical to designing for sustainability. Product designers and engineers can leverage simulation software in the early stages of design, when changing the material and manufacturing choices costs the least but matters the most.  

Designing for sustainability also minimizes the amount of material used in a product, making it easier to disassemble to encourage recycling and reuse at the end of product life, or prolonging useful life through improved reliability and durability of the product. 

Why are R&D, technology, and innovation critical to drive progress towards a sustainable future? 

A critical component to a sustainable future is the ability to rein-in GHG emissions and quantities of carbon dioxide in the air. The energy sector, in particular, is crucial to hitting the net-zero emissions (NZE) target, since it is the largest GHG producer. Per the International Energy Agency (IEA), innovation is central: about 35% of GHG emissions reductions needed in 2050 come from technologies that are still in development and have not reached markets at commercial scale. In parallel, continued innovation is needed to improve already existing technologies. Hence, NZE targets are not achievable without R&D and innovation. Technologies need to be developed, improved, matured, scaled up and deployed – not only to curb emissions but also to improve other aspects of environmental sustainability such as freshwater conservation and management, ambient noise reduction, improvements to material circularity, etc. A sustainable future requires huge leaps of innovation, as soon as possible, and technology solutions that are affordable and can enable broad adoption. Yet, developing and bringing new technologies to market takes time and involves a lot of uncertainties. This is where the engineering simulation comes in. 

What is the role of engineering simulation software in the context of sustainability, and why is it so important? 

An obvious sustainability benefit is that engineering simulation software can greatly reduce or eliminate waste of material and energy needed to build physical prototypes for testing, since all the testing is done virtually, on computers. However, this benefit is negligible compared to the massive benefits of being able to accelerate technical innovations. The ability to achieve net-zero emissions and other sustainability goals in any industry hinges on technical innovations that scale up and improve already existing technology, as well as invention, development, maturation and massive deployment of novel technologies.  

Engineering simulation enables product designers, engineers and scientists to significantly accelerate their R&D activities by: 

• Rapidly ideating and validating new design concepts to gain understanding and deeper insight into how to troubleshoot and maximize design performance with sustainability in mind. 
• Reducing risks of bringing new technologies to market. 
• Building confidence that innovations will perform as intended under real-life conditions. 
•  Minimizing the amount of material used in the product by performing topological optimizations 
• Exploring the component layout and order of assembly on a virtual prototype to make product disassembly and recycling easier.   

Beyond the design stage, other benefits of engineering software include the ability to create and deploy digital twins of physical assets in the field for operational efficiency improvements and prognostic health management, which reduce overall environmental impact.  

Can you share some examples of technology solutions you have developed and why they have been so impactful to advance sustainability goals? 

Ansys is the leading developer of physics-based engineering simulation software that is used by customers across all industries, from the largest global corporations to startups, research labs, and universities. Our portfolio of engineering software products can solve the most complex challenges in the areas of structural mechanics, fluid dynamics, electronics and electromagnetics, optics and photonics, semiconductors, safety analysis, embedded software, digital mission engineering, process integration and design optimization (PIDO) among others, while leveraging the latest high-performance computing (HPC), GPU and cloud technology. 

Virtually every software product in the Ansys portfolio can be applied, and has been applied by our customers, to design and develop for sustainability. 

For example, Ansys Granta, our materials information management software, was used by DEKO for rapid early-stage assessment of carbon footprint. By comparing alternative materials that fit criteria for sustainability, substances of regulatory concern, price and manufacturing processes, the customer was able to make the right material trade-offs and supply chain decisions that reduced a product’s carbon footprint by 20%. 

Our flagship solvers for fluid dynamics and structural mechanics, namely Ansys Fluent and Ansys Mechanical, are broadly used across a variety of industries for design and development of various sustainable technology solutions such as wind turbines, solar thermal collectors, heat pumps, electrolyzers and fuel cells, electric motors and batteries, carbon capture technology, etc. 

Rolls Royce  leverages Ansys’ multiphysics (structural, thermal) simulation solutions and HPC to develop smarter and cleaner engines to power a more sustainable future for aviation while also reducing operational carbon footprint by incorporating digital twins. 

Ansys Lumerical was used, for example, to improve efficiency of an autonomous plastic waste sorting system based on innovative short-wave infrared (SWIR) sensing solution that autonomously identified plastic based on its light reflection. Simulation enabled fast and accurate analysis to optimize the light reflection coupling, absorption layer, and fiber head design. 

Our flagship solvers for electromagnetics, Ansys Maxwell and Ansys HFSS are used by customers to design efficient electric machines and reliable power electronics, to determine optimal placement for sensors and antennas, to ensure integrity of electrical signal, and to prevent EMI/EMC issues.   

Ansys also offers the industry-first integrated platform for development, testing, and verification of battery management systems (BMS). Ansys medini analyze performs functional safety analysis of the BMS design, while Ansys SCADE Suite produces and verifies the embedded control software.  

Ansys Sherlock is the only reliability physics-based electronics design tool that provides fast and accurate life predictions for electronic hardware at the component, board, and system levels in early-stage design. BMW uses it to assess the performance of electronic components such as PCBs under a range of thermal cycles, and to test them for shock, random vibration, and steady mechanical loads. Sherlock has delivered up to a 3x acceleration in BMW’s reliability testing for electronics components like OBCs and DC-DC converters, which not only allows them to get designs launched faster, but also supports innovation. “I can look at a wider range of charging scenarios, in greater depth,” says Dr. Pascal Schirmer, development engineer for the Department of Power Electronics at BMW Group. “I can do more experiments. I can make discoveries. That adds up to product innovation, which is absolutely critical at BMW in meeting our goals for electric vehicle adoption and sustainability.”