Ping Golf Optimizes Finite Element Analysis with Hyperworks

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

In this video from SC14, Eric Morales from Ping Golf describes how the company uses Hyperworks software from Altair to optimize their golf club finite element analysis workloads.

clubFull Transcript: 

insideHPC: Eric, I’m kind of intrigued by what you guys are doing with Altair. How did you come to use these tools?

Eric Morales: Well we started using finite element analysis along with computational fluid dynamics, and we really needed a good tool that could work with all different kinds of software, and Altair really has those tools that are multi-functional across different software.

insideHPC: Right, it’s the Hyperworks software you’re talking about?

Eric Morales: Right all the hyper-work stuff. But on top of that, we realized that what we were doing was taking too long. On my desktop, it was taking 13/15 hours for just one job. And if something went wrong, it’s another 13/15 hours. So very quickly we realized we needed some more power. So we got into HPC, and those same jobs took 20/30 minutes and it’s just amazing,

insideHPC: And so you’re running it on a cluster, how many nodes now to get that result?

Eric Morales: Currently we’re running a three node cluster, 16 cores on each node. And it’s just fantastic.

insideHPC: Well this is just changing how you get your work done, it sounds like?

Eric Morales: It really is, it’s lightning fast. And with Altair’s tools, we can manage the compute nodes so we make sure that the resources on node one and node two don’t interfere with each other. We can run [Fluent?] and [Dyna?], and everything just runs just fine.

insideHPC: And then what about the other guys in the office? Don’t they tend to step on each other? Does the Altair tool’s help with that?

Eric Morales: It really does, it’s a very good scheduling tool. You can throw your jobs in they’ll run one after another, and it very equally manages all the jobs.

insideHPC: Okay. So, what is the deign goal when you’re doing a new club? Is it hit it farther, straighter, faster, what?

Eric Morales: Yes for all of them. Essentially, for our designs we want to go stronger, lighter, and faster, like Altair. And each one has a different goal. The most current one is the G-30 driver and we first optimized the outside shape. So it’s as aerodynamic as possible. Once that was done and the shaped changed, we had to totally revamp everything inside, because the outside shaped changed, all the ballistics and the material stress – all that changed, so we had to re-optimize the entire structure. And so we had to do both, and we had a lot of guys working on that.

insideHPC: So you got a structural golf ball with the divots and everything, and you’re seeing how it’s going to behave – these different change of structures?

Eric Morales: We do, it’s crazy. So we simulate the golf ball hitting the golf club: so what’s bending, how much it’s bending, is it too thick, is it too thin? Believe it or not, the strike face is about the same thickness of a number two pencil. That’s the thickest part of the whole thing. And then all the other areas that are really thin that have been optimized, are no thicker than eight pieces of paper stacked right on top of each other – incredibly thin and that’s why we need such high resolutions on everything we do.

insideHPC: I’m curious; I know the ball of the forms a little bit impact time, does the face of the club, does that shimmer?

Eric Morales: Oh yeah, it’s amazing how much it deflects.

insideHPC: Really?

Eric Morales: Yeah.

insideHPC: And bounces back into place?

Eric Morales: Yes, exactly where it– it bends about 0.1 to 0.12 inches.

insideHPC: No kidding?

Eric Morales: Yeah, and that’s just the face.

insideHPC: That’s just from whacking it?

Eric Morales: Yeah.

insideHPC: Wow.

Eric Morales: That’s just from whacking it. And the ball actually squishes to about half its original size.

insideHPC: Half its size?

Eric Morales: It’s amazing.

insideHPC: Wow, very cool. Okay, well it sounds like you’ve got a new way of doing business. Because 16 hours to 30, you can do a half dozen of these a day, couldn’t you, with this many iterations?

Eric Morales: Yeah, we can. We really can. And it really streamlines our process and one of the biggest things is it saves us so much time that we can then take that time we’ve saved and focus on new, creative ideas. And that’s where we’re really getting the bang for our buck here, is it allows our engineers to be more creative, more innovative and it gets better products out on the market.

In this video from SC14, Eric Morales from Ping Golf describes how the company uses Display Manager software from Altair to optimize their CFD workflow designing new golf clubs.

See the Full Transcript.

See our Full Coverage of SC14.