My Recent Triumph!

This is more of a personal experience and hopefully is fun to the reader...

Altair Start-up Challenge

Altair start-up challenge is an annual competition between the most coveted start-ups across the nation. The event started in 2019 with Altair looking to mentor start-ups on simulation driven design and technology solutions. It is a collaboration of industry giants with ARAI, CII and startupindia being few of the big names to be involved. Experts from various backgrounds and industry with tons of design and simulation experience and leading position in their respective industries come together to guide and judge the final stages. With such exposure and a cash prize involved, most start-ups want to be part of this.

In my previous experience at Ingo electric, amongst other responsibilities, I was also in charge of the Altair start-up challenge. This boded well with my involvement with the CAE team. First round was to make an application explaining the product and entry problem. Naturally, for this we chose to enter flagship product ingo Flee. It is a ruggedly built, meant for load carrying, micro-mobility solution with top speed of 25kmph and range of 50km. The application round saw a staggering 207 applicants, of which about 60 went through to the next stage.

The next round revolved around a progress presentation. Altair was very supportive in between the sessions and therefore was aware of what is happening with the teams. Ingo fully utilised all the facilities offered by the software giant and had frequent office visits as well for in-person support with the CAE team. We had a process plan defined at the start of the second round and were on schedule. The plan involved conducting full vehicle durability assessment on chassis & weld regions; Full vehicle static lateral (0.5G) analysis; full vehicle static vertical (3G) analysis; Component level static analysis; full vehicle dynamic analysis (modal & harmonic) and finally MBD modelling. Apart from the virtual scenarios the vehicle was loaded with strain gauges and accelerometers to conduct RLDA testing. (pics). This round also involved making a video, I featured in the video (though being camera conscious didn’t really help) but we finished 3rd after the video and progress presentation in the points table (so, maybe the video wasn’t all that bad!).

We progressed in to third round and there wasn’t much of a headroom in terms of time between second and third rounds. In the couple of months that we had, the focus was to get the product production ready and a slight drift in focus with the Altair challenge was inevitable. This lead to the team missing some key deadlines, MBD modelling could not be finished. MBD modelling has its own challenges with lots of vehicle dynamics involved and the CAE team did not have the expertise while the Design team was caught up on production readiness of the vehicle.

We did finish the static, fatigue, harmonic and modal analysis and presented the results. Apart from the analysis at a full vehicle level, we had also conducted component level static and fatigue analysis on parts that were observed to have failed during initial prototyping stages like the neck region connecting the chassis with the front assembly, stand and stand bracket optimisation, swingarm and the footboard containing battery and controller and secondary battery buck converter). (pics)

We presented our work showcasing even the design changes made in particular to the stand, stand bracket and the neck, based on static and fatigue analysis simulation results. The judging panel included members from ARAI, TATA, CII, startupindia ministers, etc. Unfortunately, I was only a silent spectator in the final virtual presentation as I was attacked by this vicious apparently novel virus known as covid and could not utter a word with full symptoms and more. I did barge in on few of the questions later in the presentation though.

The experience of all this was surreal to say the least, although a bit hectic at times and a very tedious task of uploading the presentations on the Altair cloud link (just never worked!). there were about 8 teams which entered the final round, all worthy of winning, some from the shark tank fame (revamp moto) and some making big names for them already. So, when the winners were announced 5 days later and Ingo was the top of the list, we could not believe. The judging panel in the comments lauded our efforts but more importantly pointed out mistakes (pretty major ones on occasions), but were mightily impressed by the simulation based design changes made to the vehicle. It fit the description of what Altair was trying to do with star-up challenge.

To win is that easy, just understand the description. But to focus on processes is the bigger and more fun challenge. We focused on getting the processes right never worried about what our points or finishing position would be and that I think was where we won.