Peugeot Sport to Use HyperWorks Suite in Racecar Development

Peugeot Sport, the racing division of the French carmaker, announced that it has partnered with Altair Engineering and selected its HyperWorks Suite to optimize composite development processes. The choice has been made, as Peugeot says, because especially in race car development, a flexible and fast way to evaluate the design of composite parts is essential to improve the overall car performance.

"A major reason to choose the HyperWorks Suite is the user friendliness of HyperMesh, especially for the creation of composites models," said Livio Galassi, composite design engineer and structure analyst at Peugeot Sport, in a release. "The interface is very intuitive and easy to learn. Furthermore, I see many great improvements in the area of composite model creation and optimization in the recent version of the software suite. This new approach allows us a faster and more efficient design of composite parts."

Peugeot Sport is using HyperMesh, the pre-processor of the suite, OptiStruct for optimization and HyperView for the post-processing of the data. The software suite is mainly used to design and optimize structural elements in composites, such as for the chassis and bodywork of Peugeot's LMP1 car.

"Another important reason to choose HyperWorks is the flexible license system Altair offers," said Galassi. "We can use the HyperWorks units we already have for any HyperWorks application needed and can also use them for Altair's partner products of the HWEC (HyperWorks Enabled Community). Even if we haven't done this yet, it is an option we are thinking about as it will help us to consolidate our software costs. Moreover, Altair's customer support and the customer communication with its homepage, newsletter and events is excellent."