Companies Need to Think about Energy Innovations
Figure 1.Two-thirds of the global target GHG emission deductions could come from added energy efficiencies and renewable energies. (Image courtesy of CIMdata and the International Energy Agency.)
“Companies are starting to realize that the whole idea of sustainability and the innovation around green products is not just something they have to do for regulatory compliance or brand, or to reduce cost and minimize waste,” said Rob Harwood, global industry director at ANSYS. “They are realizing there is new business growth in this area of green sustainable product development. There is money to be made.”
According to Figure 1, created by CIMdata and the International Energy Agency, two-thirds of the global targeted GHG emission deductions could be achieved by improving energy efficiencies and investing in renewable energies.
As a result, both of these green initiatives are ripe for new business and product opportunities if engineers can unlock them using computer-aided engineering (CAE) tools like simulation and system modeling. Creating energy innovations is a challenge that requires a lot of trial and error during short product development cycles. CAE tools can help engineers map the design space of these products a lot faster and cost-effectively than traditional physical prototypes.“It’s not just a matter of small incremental developments anymore. Major sectors associated with energy production and consumption have been around for a long time; their products are really well designed and optimized,” explained Harwood. “To get where companies need to be to meet growth targets, they can’t just be business as usual. They have to come up with something different. This is where the concept of ‘breakthrough energy innovation’ comes from.”
Energy Innovative Products Must Be Complex or Disruptive
Nebia shower water and temperature dispersion simulation compared to a traditional shower. Nebia uses less water and maintains its heat while covering users in a nice mist. (Image courtesy of ANSYS.)
Harwood argues that companies looking to push their products to be more innovative and green really have two options. They can make their products more complicated using smart technologies, or they can aim for technology that is disruptive. Either way, they face a much larger design space to explore.
“Existing products are becoming smarter with a lot of software embedded into them,” said Harwood. “You'll also see companies take a product that has been out for years and come at it from a completely different angle—basically building a new, much better mouse trap.”
One company Harwood points out as disrupting its field is Nebia and its shower technology. Nebia's shower head is based on aerospace fuel dispersion heads.
The result is a shower that is more mist than drips. The new shower head uses up to 70 percent less water than traditional shower heads. The mist itself is also designed to maintain its heat while in the air. These attributes of the shower head translate into a significant energy savings.
Nebia took an everyday product and reimagined it into something completely different. ANSYS reports that this new shower system exists in a design space that has never been explored before. As a result, the company used a lot of simulations to ensure the product was up to its standards.
Massive Design Spaces Are a Significant Challenge to Energy Innovation
Figure 2.Comparison of where various companies focus their simulation efforts: the system level, sub-system level and component level based on their industry (Energy, Transport, Industrial) and best-in-class status (top 20 percent of performers). (Image courtesy of the Aberdeen Group.)
“If you start with a product that is more complicated, the interactions and design trade-offs are also much more complex,” explained Harwood.
“By the same token,” he added, “if you come into something with a new disruptive idea, your design space is almost unlimited as you are not working within the constraints of previous designs.”
To combat this extensively large design space, engineers can use simulation, system modeling and optimization tools. These CAE tools help to map the design space and look for optimized configurations of the product.
“Simulation enables engineers to check the complex design space and rapidly explore it,” observed Harwood. “It is a lot more practical than physical models. You can’t explore a design space with physical testing alone. Simulation and virtual prototyping is the only way to practically deliver breakthrough energy innovation.”
Perhaps this is why, according to Figure 2, the top energy, transportation and industrial performers consistently have a larger focus on system engineering than their competition. System simulations reduce the product to a series of 1D simulations and simplified models that have a low computation footprint. This makes these tools faster at iterating through each design configuration, making it easier and faster to find optimal product designs.
As a result, the top performers have a better idea of what the product's design space looks like and can use that information as a starting point to discover system-wide optimized products. The 3D simulations will still be needed to optimize those finer details that the simplified system model ignored. But the system-level simulation will give engineers additional insights into how to optimize the product, reducing the overall number of 3D simulations.
In a white paper outlining breakthrough energy innovation, ANSYS wrote: to “those looking to deliver breakthrough energy innovation, integrated engineering simulation from the component to the system level is one of the key enablers of value creation along each of the three dimensions: product innovation for regulatory purposes, product innovation to meet customers’ ‘green’ expectations and process innovation to minimize waste and reduce time to market.”
Five Tips to Creating Energy Innovations
ANSYS suggests that many of the breakthroughs in energy innovation will come from these technical areas:
- Electrification
- Fuel and machine efficiency
- Thermal management
- Aerodynamics
- Lightweighting
As a result, engineers should focus their simulations on these areas when optimizing their designs.
As an example, the aerospace industry has made significant improvements to its aircraft fuel mileage thanks to focusing its optimizations to these five technical areas. First, composites have made aircraft lighter without limiting part strength. Electrification has also reduced the weight and improved the performance of aircraft. Finally, aircraft use less energy thanks to improved aerodynamics, thermal management of the internal environment and the use of more efficient propulsion systems.
Clearly, these five technical areas can help engineers make greener products, but unlike aircraft, not every product will be associated with these five technical areas. However, product engineers have seen improvements to their designs by just focusing on one or two of these five technical areas.
For instance, a low-hanging fruit for many product optimizations is lightweighting. If a product is lighter, it will take less energy to move said product. Lighter designs will also typically see energy and material savings during construction. Innovations in construction processes have unlocked the potential for even lighter products that would have been impossible to manufacture before.
“Lightweighting can come from replacing heavier materials with lighter materials. That is the most obvious solution. Say, using aluminum or composites instead of steel,” noted Harwood. “But lightweighting can also come from shifting the manufacturing paradigm from traditional milling to 3D printing. Then you can look at shape and topology optimization as a means to lightweight even if you are using the same material.”
Simulation vendors such as ANSYS are helping companies to improve energy efficiency with its portfolio of finite element analysis (FEA), computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and model-based system engineering (MBSE) tools.
To learn about other tools that ANSYS has that can facilitate a breakthrough energy innovation, follow this link.
ANSYS has sponsored ENGINEERING.com to write this article. It has provided no editorial input. All opinions are mine. —Shawn Wasserman