Altair's CAE product family helps to structurally design winner in Volvo Ocean Race, the Ericsson Race Team yacht Ericsson 4: Altair Engineering announced today that its HyperWorks CAE platform has been used by ABstructures, an Italian structural design company, to structurally design and optimize the winning yacht in the Volvo Ocean Race, Ericsson 4. The yacht, skippered by Brazilian Torben Grael, claimed victory in the Volvo Ocean Race on June 27 in St. Petersburg, Russia, after 8 months and more than 37,000 nautical miles sailed around the world under the harshest conditions.

The HyperWorks simulation suite also was used in the development of Ericsson 3 - first to be launched Ericsson Race Team boat, which came in fourth this year. ABstructures has extensively employed HyperWorks to design and optimize the carbon structures of both Ericsson yachts and has achieved fundamental structural improvements compared to the older-generation yachts that competed in the 2004 edition of the Volvo race. The combination of cutting-edge CAE technology and the extensive hands-on experience of ABstructures' designers has enabled the engineering company to deliver the best design for lightweight structural projects in all regions of the world.

"We have been using HyperWorks for a long time, in many projects - with ABstructures as well as within former work projects," said Dr. Andrea Avaldi, managing director, ABstructures. "I like the software suite because it enables us to handle most of the development tasks in structural design within one user interface and under the same license agreement. Thanks to HyperWorks, we could achieve a weight reduction of about 10 percent on all the structurally most important parts of this campaign's Ericsson yachts. This could not have been possible in the set time frame without the technology provided by Altair."

"We congratulate the Ericsson Race Team and ABstructures on their outstanding success and are happy to have had the opportunity to be part of such a remarkable project," said Dr. Michael Hoffmann, Altair vice president for EMEA. "HyperWorks is the best CAE suite that structural design companies like ABstructures can use. It provides the tools needed to drive an optimized design process; and, thanks to the unique licensing system that opens up a whole world of CAE tools, engineers only pay for what they use."