Simulation has come a long way in a relatively short time. I remember during the early 2000s in my automotive career working on an application with a retaining ring on an aluminum tube. The ring groove needed to be deep enough to seat the retaining ring but not so deep that the integrity of the tube was compromised. The variables began to pile up as the groove tolerance, ring tolerance, ring orientation and push-off force were all considered. To do it “the right way” was turning into a large and expensive designed experiment. Simulation seemed like the smart move to take. After looking at companies that could perform the work and finding an optimized design, my boss said, “What can we do for free?” The perception was that simulation would be an expensive endeavor.
The simulation field is incredibly complex and fascinating to observe as an engineer and user. The barriers to using simulation are falling as CAD companies move to become full-service engineering tools that help engineers design, test and virtually build components. Shifting to cloud-based options and pay-as-you-go price plans gives customers a new entry point to the world of simulation. The landscape has always been crowded with several options for engineers and the ability to choose between large simulation giants and smaller companies that perform more specific functions.
Gamma Technologies is one of the companies that works hard with its head down in its own lane to remain in the simulation game. The Westmont, Illinois, application and simulation company has a range of products and tools for engineers to study thermal, fluids, structural and multi-body systems. Engineering.com spoke with the company’s vice president of operations, Matt Warner; head of marketing; Michelle Murray-Ross, and Western Regional manager, Patrick O’Heron, to learn about the software. Much of that conversation centered around GT-Suite, a physics-based platform that runs models for systems based on part libraries—and the company’s flagship product.
Helping Customers Moving Toward Electrification
O’Heron described the evolution of Gamma Technologies in three phases. Founded in 1994, GT-Suite started with physics-based tools to study thermal, combustion and fluids. Next, the company started to bring in automation capabilities to study system-level products. The focus was on creating a physics-based platform that can control multiple workflows and keep the data in a centralized location for the entire system instead of sending files back and forth between work groups. Today, with GT-CLOUD, the company is helping its customers with scalability and using cloud solvers and web-enabled interfaces to focus on productivity improvements and process automation.
One of the big areas that Gamma Suite focuses on, just like everybody else, is electrification. “When you do engines, you get really good thermal, you get really good at combustion chemistry and you get really good at dynamics,” O’Heron said. All of this expertise is helping the company to be valuable to electric vehicle customers.
Warner highlighted some of the changes in the 2023 GT Suite release. The big changes focus on electrification, safety and thermal runaway capabilities. One thing that Gamma Technologies has noticed is a shift in how people need to consume simulation studies and data. As the needs of engineers and the requirements of electrification increase, more and more people in organizations have questions that need to be answered with simulation but don’t have the expertise to use the software. GT Play is a web application platform that enables expert simulation users to build models and use cases for more casual users. This way, the casual simulation workers can work on parameter sweeps and optimizations with the simulation or ask it a series of parameter-based questions. Solvers can then run these analyses on the cloud and get fast results. These casual users might be designers or application engineers who want fast answers to make decisions but don’t need to know about the simulation infrastructure and computing power that’s going on behind the scenes.
Acquisitions, Partnerships and Delivery Methods
The company has also made a few acquisitions in recent years. O’Heron pointed out that acquisitions are made not just for the strength of the products coming into Gamma Technologies but also for the strength of the design teams. For instance, in November 2021, Gamma Technologies acquired exothermia, which brought in exothermia Suite for the analysis of exhaust and emissions. This complemented the chemistry knowledge base that was already in place with GT Suite. Additionally, Power Design Technologies and its tool, PowerForge, were acquired in July 2021 to help Gamma Technologies build up its power electronics capabilities.
A partnership with KULR brings together Gamma Technologies’ simulation software and KULR battery safety technology. GT AutoLion is Gamma’s lithium-ion battery simulation software. The tool calculates battery life based on plating, the solid electrolyte interphase (SEI) layer and other electrochemical mechanisms. Data from batteries in the field can be tied back to digital twins that can build the knowledge base of how the batteries age and degrade.
Warner noted that the way users access and use Gamma Technologies’ tools are also changing. Historically, customers have used software on-premises, but different options were in place to break up the larger studies and make the simulation more digestible. Larger customers might have high-performance computing (HPC) servers, but smaller customers ran studies on the workstations available. The trend in the last half-decade is moving toward longer-running studies with more cases and larger models, but even the customers with large HPCs might not have enough power to complete the biggest studies. Cloud offerings let customers pay by the hour and have the scalability to run huge studies without upgrading in-house computing power.
The residential HVAC market is a customer base that makes complete sense as an end-user of simulation, especially in the thermal realms, but we don’t hear about it very often. However, Gamma Technologies’ has a section of its GT-Suite tailored specifically to heating and cooling studies.
Warner noted that the software is built to use libraries of very fundamental components. You don’t go to the base libraries and pull out an engine to study. Instead, you pull out a pipe and start to build the engine model, creating the system that you want to study. The HVAC activities grew out of simulation engineers using these components in a new way.
O’Heron added that GT-Suite can be used on anything that emits carbon. When the company started, the focus was on the automotive industry. It has mostly stayed in that area, but the software is broad enough to be applied to many systems. One example used during user training is a coffee maker. It helps new users understand how to build fluid flow, transfer heat and control function models in the software.
Final Thoughts on GT-Suite
We’re asking more of our simulation software every day, and the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning is only going to add more possibilities for simulation. Engineers want results early in the design and development process, with a high degree of fidelity in the results, and several options for different simulations and data presentation. Complicating the issue is the rise of high-performance computing (HPC) and the large investment required to jump up to that level as opposed to the pay-as-you-go model offered by cloud-based simulation.
In terms of recognition, Gamma Technologies doesn’t have a huge footprint, but it does have a wide customer base. To this point, Warner pointed out that GT-Suite is a system simulation tool that might be a little more niche versus the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) tools that every single product development process could conceivably use. O’Heron, on the other hand, pointed out that a fundamental value of Gamma Technologies is customer support and developing customer relationships.
Gamma Technologies seems to be doing the right things. The company has a robust customer base and a vast product catalog. The HVAC design tool is a differentiator that goes beyond what we think of as industrial simulation to a novel application. Several partnerships and acquisitions are in process, showing that the company has an eye on the future and is taking a solid strategic look at its current capabilities. A wide user base attends annual conferences and publishes papers showing success stories with the software. Wide-spread recognition might come over time, but with or without that glory, the company is using its software to help its customers move forward.