Mahindra
Was founded in 1945 as a steel trading company and in 1947, the Group entered auto manufacturing to bring in the iconic Willy’s Jeep (under license) on to Indian roads. The founders, K.C and J.C. Mahindra, believed that introducing new modes of transportation held the key to India’s prosperity, so one of their first goals was to build durable, rugged vehicles that could handle the rough Indian terrain. In the 1950s and 60s, the Group diversified into businesses like Steel, Tractors, and more. Over time the Group consolidated its position in Automobiles, Tractors and Steel and entered promising sectors like IT, Hospitality, Financial Services, Components, Aerospace and Logistics, led by the goal of providing products and services that support prosperity. Today the Group is a $16.9 billion global corporation employing more than 200,000 people across the globe. The Group’s flagship company, Mahindra & Mahindra, is a leader in the tractor and utility vehicles space.
CAE driven product development: how ANSYS speeds up the design process in the Moto3™ Motorcycle Racing Championship
The Mahindra Group has significantly invested in Italy in the last years, strongly sustaining the Mahindra Racing Team in the Moto3™ class of MotoGP™ World Motorcycle Racing Championship. The technical team is composed by determined people with high prospects for the future. The Mahindra Racing’s engineers are focused on R&D activities and production: in this scenario the use of simulation becomes strategic because it allows to increment, fasten and make the communication between development and production more efficient. The choice to employ the ANSYS technology realizes this vision, the Workbench environment stands out for its robustness and accessibility. The current challenges are the weight reduction of the primary structures (i.e. chassis, fork) and the development time reduction for new components. Moreover, being necessary to adapt the motorbike to the racetrack every time, the main design parameters are re-set in order to pursue from time to time the best configuration. Today the numerical simulation offers an important added value for dimensioning and testing of the motorbike’s chassis, fork and power train (in particular for the intake valves); after the acquisition of experimental data on the stiffness of some components, ANSYS has been essential for the numerical-experimental correlation.
