This post was written by Dr. Ing. Kamila Flídr, Altair Sr. Technical Consultant.

Considered by many as the heart of Europe, Prague has been given many wonderful distinctions such as “City of a Hundred Spires”, “Golden City”, “Mother of Cities” or “Heart of Europe”. Its geographical position makes it a center of culture, gastronomy, architecture, science, and industry.

Prague is also the home to one of Altair’s most successful value-added resellers in Central Europe, Advanced Engineering s.r.o. who represents the HyperWorks and solidThinking channels for the Altair brand. As part of this relationship, Advanced Engineering, in conjunction with Altair, hosts its yearly technology conference – ATCx.

This year, ATCx Prague took place on Thursday, September 27th at the headquarters of Microsoft in Prague.  To begin this one-day event, the managing director of Advanced Engineering Ing. Hynek Purš presented the opening remarks and the value of Altair’s suite of solutions before handing the mic over to Kimon Afsaridis, Altair Channel Partner Manager who presented the Altair’s vision to Design the Difference™. This contribution introduced the attendees to how innovative products might be designed using Altair CAE tools and workflows.

The conference continued with a presentation from Ing. Martin Kuklík, Advanced Engineering Project Manager, on “How to Be More Effective in Model Preparation and Results Assessment”.  In the next session, I had the pleasure of presenting on the topic “Current Trends and High-Performance Computing” across industries in relation to the simulation of highly non-linear dynamic load cases with Altair RADIOSS™ solver. This was a great platform to demonstrate how Altair HyperWorks tools can be essential in increasing efficiency and accelerating product development time.

With cloud-based solutions becoming highly sought after by small and medium companies and more and more of interest for OEMs, the next session focused on the Azure Platform and and Microsoft Cloud based solutions in a presentation from Ing. Vlastimil Tesař. Then we closed the morning with a look at the new features and developments related to the structural analysis with implicit solver Altair OptiStruct™ presented by Martin Kuklík. As OptiStruct is one of the most used solvers within our Altair user community, introducing new features and enhancements for OptiStruct was well received!

After the networking lunch, our program continued with a presentation by Ing. Filip Klouda, Advanced Engineering Project Engineer featuring Altair’s electromagnetic solutions Altair FEKO™, Altair WinProp™, and Altair Flux™. With the electrification taking place especially in automotive industry, this session brought useful information about Altair electromagnetic solvers capabilities from antennas design through wireless networks planification to electric motors design and many other applications.

Following this presentation, Ing. Vojtěch Rulc, Advanced Engineering Project Engineer, provided interesting insight into Altair Compose™, Altair Activate™ and Altair Embed™ in an open matrix and open source environment for numerical computing. He focused on the possibilities of coupling this Model-Based Development toolset with Altair solvers. The next session that then focused on smart vehicle development and was presented by Altair Technical Director of Partner Sales, Dr. Armin Veitl. Lightweighting is a key aspect for electric vehicles. The insight in Altair processes such as C123 based on Multi-Disciplinary Optimization provided by Dr. Veitl was an interesting and inspiring speech for the audience.

The last part of the day was dedicated to the tools for manufacturing simulation from Altair Inspire™ suite for optimization and 3D metals printing. The capabilities of Altair Inspire Cast™ were introduced by Bc. Zuzana Štemberová, AE Project Engineer. After which Mr. Rulc highlighted what’s new in Altair Inspire™ and Altair Inspire Motion™ and Mr. Kuklík presented the new Altair Inspire Form™ environment. Mr. Afsaridis closed the Inspire part of the day by presenting the new business model based on solidThinking Units, which eliminates traditional licensing hurdles like high cost, limited access to software, and multiple licensing mechanisms. To learn more about this new licensing system, you can visit the Altair solidThinking™ webpage and watch the video.

As we saw in the Altair Inspire™ sessions, the realization of highly optimized organic designs could not be possible without new manufacturing techniques. As a nice follow up on the topic of optimization and the Altair Inspire platform, we had Doc. Ing. Miroslav Zetek, Ph.D. from the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering from the Regional Technological Institute (RTI) give this next presentation.

The Regional Technological Institute (RTI) is part of the University of West Bohemia located in Plzeň and develops and studies new manufacturing techniques such as 3D metals printing. Dr. Zetek presented the results of RTI research focusing on influence of metal powder grain size and manufacturing process on components quality and mechanical, as well as performance properties.

The last block of the day was dedicated to optimization with Altair OptiStruct™ and Altair HyperStudy™. As the program of the conference day was very rich on topics, Mr. Kuklík kept more of a focus on OptiStruct giving the conference participants interested in DOE and MDO studies set up with HyperStudy to get in touch with him personally for a separate seminar on the topic.

We closed the evening with a go-carting session followed by a nice barbecue. After trial and training rides the race itself begun! The competition was tough and the places on winners’ podium had to be well-deserved! We closed the evening with a fun awards ceremony to the winners of the race.

ATCx Prague 2018 was an event full of rich content that enabled the Czech CAE community to meet, exchange, and network. We were pleased to host 50 at this year’s event and we hope to see even more Czech business leaders at next year’s conference!