About Hyva

Hyva is the market leader in the world for tipping solutions. Hyva products are used worldwide across a range of sectors including transport, construction, mining, materials handling and waste handling & recycling. Founded in 1979 in The Netherlands, Hyva is now a global company with manufacturing facilities and subsidiaries worldwide.

Project objectives

Femto Engineering was asked to evaluate the current lifting bracket of the Hyva trailer tipper. First we determined the strength and stiffness behavior of the part under heavy loading. Then we explored how the part could be optimized to reduce weight.

Approach

We used specialized FEM software to determine the design space; this is the area the software will optimize for. During optimization the solver will remove material from the design space that is not needed, but it cannot add material, for this reason it is important to assign a design space that is large enough for Optistruct to keep removing material until it finds the best topology.

The objective of the optimization was to find a structure with the maximum stiffness for the component with a volume restriction. Increased stiffness is achieved by minimizing the strain energy in the model.

A geometric restriction places restrictions on the changes that the solver can make to the topology. The areas in the model that are not allowed to change are defined as the frozen areas, this means that Optistruct will leave these regions as they are while using surrounding elements to find the best topology.

Results

With the power of topology optimization Femto Engineers were able to achieve a weight reduction of 15% on the Hyva lifting bracket, while confidently meeting strength and stiffness requirements under heavy load. Find more background information on topology optimization here. Contact us if you want to hear more about our services.

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