BÖHME — Simulation for Manufacturing

Manufacturers Save Time and Cost Using Simulation to Make Designs Production-Ready

Mikkel Böhme, founder and Managing Director at BÖHME, has over 20 years of experience in the plastics industry from injection molding, plastics molding, additive manufacturing, and 3D prototyping. Mikkel realized that production insights are often missing from early-stage R&D, where designers tend to focus more on the performance and aesthetics aspects of the product without much consideration or anticipation of how that product might be prototyped or even manufactured at scale. Thus began a journey of bringing considerable production expertise to industrial products, making them perform better, more cost-efficient, and with an accelerated time from design to production. This naturally led to more work during the design stages, where BÖHME could add additional value. Often BÖHME was tasked with optimizing product designs for customers with no in-house R&D team. This design verification and optimization involved engineering simulation using various modeling tools, including legacy finite element analysis (FEA), computational fluid dynamics (CFD) tools, and dedicated plastic mold flow software. 

SimScale offers BÖHME multiple options to add value to its clients. Effectively, BÖHME will act as the outsourced R&D department for many extensive production facilities and product businesses. Customers need design insight at the early stages when verifying the performance of their products through simulation and physical prototyping. BÖHME can now model these products and evaluate many design variants simultaneously using the parallel computing capabilities of SimScale, which runs entirely in the cloud. This also negates the need for expensive and site-restrictive computing hardware. BÖHME can now use simulation wherever they go, including at customer premises, to collaborate more effectively with their clients and production facilities anywhere in the world. The quantitative and visual outputs from SimScale offer easy and intuitive reporting on key simulation parameters and design metrics such as structural loads, product deformation, and thermal stress — which are used to alter parametric CAD variables.

A significant benefit of using SimScale has been the short learning curve and intuitive simulation workflow. Because of automation built-in to the SimScale platform, such as automated meshing, realistic default simulation parameters, fast post-processing, and easy CAD cleanup, BÖHME can spend more of their time on actual design improvements rather than making their CAD models simulation ready, an often quoted bottleneck in CAE. 

SimScale is used on various products to virtually test how they might behave in real-world conditions. These include large domestic and industrial waste bins, optimizing the flow through a CO2 extraction engine, plastic snap-fit components, and simulating pressurized soda bottles for an extensive food and beverage manufacturer. Key outputs in structural analysis focus on Von Mises stresses within safety tolerances, deformation and displacement of snap-fit components, and non-linear material properties.

Structural Analysis for Manufacturing and Fastening

Impact testing is a core offering at BÖHME who recently performed simulated tests of a 5 kg projectile repeatedly impacting a structural casing. They spent four months developing and verifying a complete product with nine unique components and special significance on material selection for structural integrity and recyclability, as this was important to their clients. Their client was on a tight deadline to get the product to the production stage, and delays would have cost the company. With the client, they decided that before spending millions of Euros on molds and physical testing, the product needed to be validated to withstand the force impacts according to ISO standards.

There are multiple ways to design a snap function into a part. Getting it right the first time before manufacturing begins takes much work. Snap-fits are common in the industry for fastening and are versatile in their applications. In this case, BÖHME needed to validate that the force required to open a fastener would be more than 60 N. Using SimScale to evaluate the force and torque on the snap-fit assembly reduced material cost by 10% and given that tens of thousands of these will be manufactured, the cumulative saving is significant.

Next Steps for BÖHME

BÖHME is extending its use of SimScale to include other types of analysis, including more vibration and impact analysis for its structural testing and expanding into fluid flow and heat transfer analyses. Significant benefits of switching to SimScale include its cloud-native features making it accessible from anywhere via a web browser, its collaboration capabilities, and scalable licensing.