Manufacturing organizations are engaging with the latest cutting-edge technologies to reduce costs, optimize products, accelerate development cycles, and improve project team efficiency. Some of these technologies include augmented and virtual reality, real-time rendering and simulation, graphics virtualization, and AI.
All of these new technologies combined are contributing to an advanced product design workflow that enables manufacturers to create innovative, highly differentiated products. The NVIDIA RTX visual computing platform, which includes NVIDIA RTX GPUs, allows leading design and engineering teams to tap into the power of photorealistic visualization, real-time simulation, AI, and additive manufacturing.
And many companies in the industry are using NVIDIA RTX to stay ahead of the competition and bring amazing new products to market faster than ever before.
Enhancing CAD Workflows and Design Reviews
KSB SE & Co. KGaA is a leading international supplier of innovative pumps, valves, and systems. The company provides first-class products and services for energy and industrial applications, water and wastewater transport, building services, and mining.
To share their product designs with clients and stakeholders, KSB typically presents screenshots and images of the product. But the design engineers at KSB wanted to improve the quality and realism of their visuals so they could enhance internal communication and customer presentations.
Since 2004, KSB has been using Siemens NX software to enhance their product designs. Photorealism allows the design engineers to gain a deeper understanding of their designs, so by using NVIDIA Iray integrated into NX, the team at KSB is implementing photorealistic rendering into their design workflows.
The latest version of Iray also adds support for RTX, which includes dedicated ray-tracing-acceleration hardware support and an advanced acceleration structure to enable real-time ray tracing. This helps the KSB team create and showcase high-quality visuals, which has led to an increase in conversations with existing and potential customers.
“Since we rolled out this capability to our design engineers, they have been able to provide customers with photoreal images in their presentations, making them more confident in sharing their designs,” said Karsten Michael, CAx/PLM In-House Consultant at KSB.
Accelerating CAE Processes and Industrial Equipment Design
ASTEC Industries is a global OEM serving the infrastructure and mining industries. One of ASTEC’s key products is hot mix asphalt plants, and customers use ASTEC plants to produce the mix for roads all over the world.
But to produce hot mix asphalt, teams must go through the process of drying and heating aggregate — various sizes of crushed rock and sand. This process is necessary, but very energy intensive, so improving thermal efficiency is a key priority to make asphalt plants more sustainable. GPU-accelerated Discrete Element Method (DEM) calculations to simulate more realistic polyhedral aggregate particles showed 90x faster performance and helped ASTEC improve their designs by running more upfront simulations.
Using Altair EDEM with NVIDIA RTX GPUs, ASTEC has been able to optimize the design of our aggregate dryer to increase efficiency. This provides ASTEC and our customers a competitive advantage with lower running costs and reduced emissions.
—Andrew Hobbs, Head of Simulation and Modeling, ASTEC Industries, Inc
With the ability to perform complex simulations much faster using NVIDIA RTX GPUs, ASTEC can troubleshoot equipment problems and help customers improve plant operations while reducing downtime. More importantly, NVIDIA RTX helps ASTEC simulate many potential worst-case scenarios during the design phase, reducing the risk of expensive field failures.
Since inventing the world’s first graphics processing unit (GPU) in 1999, NVIDIA has been at the forefront of 3D graphics and accelerated computing. Each NVIDIA GPU architecture is carefully designed to provide breakthrough levels of performance and efficiency. And the latest technologies powered by NVIDIA RTX deliver everything designers, engineers, scientists and artists need to meet the most graphics and compute-intensive workflows.
Built on the NVIDIA Ampere architecture, RTX GPUs are equipped with the latest generation RT Cores, Tensor Cores, and CUDA cores for unprecedented rendering, AI, graphics and compute performance.
Certified for over 40 professional graphics and 3D applications, tested by leading independent software vendors (ISVs) and workstation manufacturers, and backed by a global team of support specialists, NVIDIA RTX is the advanced visual computing solution that helps professionals tackle complex design, engineering and manufacturing workflows.
Learn more about NVIDIA RTX and how the latest technology benefits manufacturing and product design.
