From concept to reality: how simulation-driven design fuels breakthrough innovation

Great ideas often seem impossible, until the right tools make them real. By embedding simulations into the product design process, companies can overcome traditional limitations, turning ambitious concepts into tangible, optimized products. Whether refining the flow of sustainable aviation fuel, perfecting heat dissipation in medical implants, or testing materials for extreme environments, simulation-driven design offers a cost-effective and risk-free way to explore radical solutions.

Take, for example, the everyday challenge of designing stable packaging. While engineers can calculate the center of gravity of bottles and boxes using traditional methods, simulations offer a powerful way to visualize and refine designs, ensuring they remain stable during transport or storage. In high-stakes industries, simulations help test the limits of gas tanks by tweaking parameters to uncover unexpected weaknesses or sensitivities, an insight hard and expensive to achieve through physical testing alone. Simulations also allow engineers to compare different design concepts quickly, evaluating multiple variations in parallel to determine the most efficient, cost-effective, or high-performing option. Expensive prototypes and unpredictable trial-and-error are still part of the process but with reduced iterations and greater precision. By making simulation-driven design a core strategy, companies can create better products faster, with fewer costly missteps.

Breaking the invisible barrier: the power of simulation-driven design in solving complex challenges

Some design challenges may be invisible to the human eye, yet they can still be solved with the right approach. Simulation-driven design provides a window into the unseen, revealing behaviors that would otherwise remain a mystery. From analyzing the vibrations in industrial cooling lines (too fast to capture) to visualizing how fluids mix inside tiny medical devices (too small to observe), simulations unlock insights that physical testing alone cannot.

Consider gas and fluidic systems, where even the smallest parameter changes can have massive effects. Engineers often don’t know how sensitive certain variables are until they run simulations to test various conditions. These digital experiments prevent costly surprises and ensure products perform as expected. By providing fast, scalable, and iterative solutions, simulation-driven design empowers companies to go beyond what’s measurable and engineer with unprecedented precision.

The end of trial-and-error: how simulation-driven design eliminates guesswork in innovation

For too long, innovation has been synonymous with uncertainty. But what if mistakes were optional? Simulation-driven design is not just about testing, it’s about precision, allowing engineers to refine designs before the first prototype is even built. Whether optimizing absolute position sensors for aerospace applications or analyzing subtle vibrations in high-performance propellers, simulation-driven design replaces physical trial-and-error with virtual certainty.

A striking example comes from the world of self-driving cars. AI-powered vehicles are trained to detect and stop pedestrians, but early simulations revealed a critical flaw, some systems were only trained to stop for a single person, failing to respond when two or more appeared. By running extensive virtual tests, engineers can ensure even small changes in real-world conditions don’t compromise safety. Simulations can also be validated with physical tests, ensuring that digital predictions align with real-world performance and providing an extra layer of confidence before a product reaches the market. By embedding simulation-driven design into workflows from the start, teams can iterate smarter, work faster, and innovate with confidence.

Beyond software: unlocking the true power of simulation-driven design

The most innovative companies don’t leave success to chance, they design with simulations. By harnessing simulation-driven design, businesses can unlock deeper insights, accelerate development, and eliminate costly missteps. From preventing unstable packaging to refining AI-driven vehicle behavior, simulation-driven design is shaping the future of product innovation and development across industries. Simulations can help in many more innovation projects than currently applied. Simply purchasing simulation software isn’t enough, true innovation requires experts who understand how to apply and interpret these complex tools effectively. The question isn’t whether to adopt simulation-driven design, it’s how fast you can integrate it to stay ahead.

The post Design smarter, not harder: The power of simulation-driven product innovation appeared first on Verhaert Masters in Innovation.

The post Design smarter, not harder: The power of simulation-driven product innovation appeared first on Verhaert Masters in Innovation.

Development methodologies

Contrary to aerospace & automotive sectors which use conservative waterfall and V-models, Verhaert employs a development methodology called “RICE”. It has been developed and tuned in-house for almost 4 decades now and aims to support projects with many more uncertainties than encountered in previously mentioned sectors. While not going into too much depth, one of the axioms of RICE is “accelerating learning”, which enables us to identify and de-risk critical development items from the very beginning. Many techniques are employed in order to accomplish this target: pretotyping & mock-ups, system design, morph charts & trade-offs, breadboarding and of course simulation.

1D simulations

Simulation can be performed in many ways, across all 4 dimensions and comprehending multiple domains. 1D simulations are a specific subset that is particularly well-suited for the support of system design. They make abstraction of component geometries (as opposed to 2D, 3D and 4D simulations) and focus on the interaction between components (or lumped elements). For these reasons, we love 1D simulations:

• They are easy to set up: depending on the used tools and system complexity, 1D models can be set up within minutes or hours.
• They are computationally inexpensive: this too depends on many factors, though 1D simulations are orders of magnitude faster than e.g. 3D/4D FEAs or CFDs.
• They easily support multi-physics models. Almost any system operates in more than one relevant physical domain: mechanical, thermal, electrical, pneumatic/hydraulic, computing/control, … Incorporating additional domains in your model is easy with the availability of adequate libraries in the simulation environment.
• They’re inherently easy to understand for both engineers and laypersons. As the model consists of nodes (representing physical components and/or phenomena) and connections (representing the flow of energy, mass or information), complex systems can be represented in a comprehensible graphical way and allow for easy monitoring, troubleshooting and tweaking.

Why you should employ (1D) simulation from the very start of your development

While 3D and 4D FEAs & CFD certainly yield lots of information and have their place in simulation-driven design, it is oftentimes not economical to employ these methods during very early development: the amount of work required for setting up and running such simulations is high while its usefulness is debatable as the number of unknowns is at its peak.

This is why we turn to 1D simulations: they are the ultimate tool for system design and we’ll show how they accelerate developments right from the first conceptual phase below:

• Think it through: while building the model, you need to think through each node or building block – its function and relation with the other building blocks. If the model is missing crucial components, interactions or boundary conditions, this will be noticeable in the simulated behavior of the system. Hence 1D simulation provides an excellent sanity check on the architecture you are envisioning and helps uncover unknowns very early in the design process.

The post How simulation can accelerate your development from the very start appeared first on Verhaert Masters in Innovation.

The post How simulation can accelerate your development from the very start appeared first on Verhaert Masters in Innovation.

The last decade we’ve seen these boundaries degrade to the point that CFD tools are applicable to everyday product design. The improvement of user interfaces, integration with CAD tools and automation of various modeling tasks have brought down the entry costs. There’s still a steep learning curve, however CFD has become an invaluable tool for more and more industries.

Let’s take a look at an example in the Fast Moving Consumer Goods business. Maybe you’re familiar with at-home beer dispensers or coffee vending machines with a multitude of products. Most of these appliances contain some kind of cooling system to cool down at least some of the contained products.

Home beer dispenser development

These appliances are governed by requirements of low cost, minimal material usage, space allocation constraints and ever more stringent power requirements. Squeezing out the last bit of performance has become a non-trivial task which can no longer be done with empirical formulas and hand calculations only.

Generic coolbox design (left) and CFD simulation of internal air circulation (right)

Here we show a generic coolbox design with internal air circulation which must cool down and keep cool 2 cardboard BIB containers. Hand calculations are fine to determine steady state conditions, but CFD can be used for so much more.

• Optimizing the placement of BIBs, air inlets and outlets for optimal airflow and cooling performance.
• Assessing the effect of cooling strategy on cool down time.
• Assessing the ideal control loop feedback for sensor locations.
• Calculating power requirements across various operating regimes and environmental conditions.
• Assessing the product temperature uniformity and prevention of product freezing conditions.
• Localizing cold spots which may cause condensation problems.

Building a single concept breadboard takes weeks and requires hundreds of hours designing, manufacturing and assembling. A CFD model however can provide answers in days. While a single cool down test takes hours, it can be simulated in minutes once a model has been created.

As such, CFD speeds up development cycles and delivers insights which are hard to obtain with empirical formulas and testing only.

Interested in finding out more on how Verhaert can apply simulations to your product designs or engineering problems? Get in touch.

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Leave us your email and get in contact with Max van der Weyden, Manager Innovation Acceleration Services – Product Innovation, to help you with your innovation process.

The post Transient conjugate heat transfer simulation of a cooling solution appeared first on Verhaert Masters in Innovation.

The post Transient conjugate heat transfer simulation of a cooling solution appeared first on Verhaert Masters in Innovation.