Accelerating Smartphone Drop-Test Simulation: A Case Study on LG Electronics

LG Electronics Inc. is a global leader and technology innovator in consumer electronics, mobile communications, and home appliances. With annual worldwide sales of $45.22 billion in 2012, LG is one of the industry’s leading producers of flat panel TVs, mobile devices, air conditioners, washing machines, and refrigerators. The company is constantly developing new versions of smartphones, making it one of the fastest-selling, most rapidly evolving, and most competitive products in the electronics industry. The company's profitability, positioning, and reputation among consumers are significantly impacted by the time to market for new models.

The smartphone industry is one of the fastest evolving and most competitive sectors in the electronics industry. New models are developed every few months, and any reduction in time to market can significantly impact a manufacturer's profitability, positioning, and reputation. However, certain aspects of the development process, such as drop-test simulation, have remained time-consuming and resistant to acceleration. Drop-test simulation is a crucial element in ensuring the quality and robustness of a smartphone. Despite using computer simulation for virtual drop testing, LG Electronics (LGE) faced challenges in shortening the simulation time due to the large number of parts and assemblies in smartphones, the time-consuming geometry cleanup, simplification, and meshing, and the multitude of contact definitions that required many manual steps. Thorough testing involves a variety of drop and bending conditions, where analysis setup is time-intensive. Post-processing and generating reports also contributed to the overall time to achieve results. On average, drop-test simulation took one to two weeks to set up, conduct, and analyze, with modeling and post-processing representing 60 to 80 percent of the time invested.

In collaboration with Altair, LGE aimed to create a seamlessly integrated drop-test simulation automation system that would enable LGE engineers to conduct virtual smartphone drop tests within just 24 hours. This methodology, incorporating modeling and drop and bending analysis, was expected to significantly speed up the development process and provide a substantial competitive advantage for LGE. The Altair-LGE team developed a way to automatically simplify geometry, create solder joints, generate high-quality meshes, and create contacts between parts using Altair’s HyperWorks computer-aided engineering suite. This suite includes HyperMesh for pre-processing, the RADIOSS solver, HyperView for post-processing, and its embedded automation framework. The automated system developed by the Altair-LGE team requires only a few hours and is a fully integrated, end-to-end, and user-friendly system that can simulate drop and bending test scenarios. The system also promotes standardization, reliability, and repeatability of the drop and bending analyses.

• The automation system developed by the Altair-LGE team addresses several major challenges in the electronics industry, including time to market, innovation, and cost. With the decreased time spent on manual operations and the reduction in human error, engineers can use the days freed up by the drop-test simulation automation to explore more iterations of the smartphone’s design to develop a more robust and innovative version. Furthermore, LGE’s warranty costs are expected to be reduced, since its optimized smartphones will be more resistant to damage from dropping. LGE is using the 24-hour drop test simulation system on its latest models, and Altair anticipates that this standardized automation process can produce similar results for the design of other types of consumer electronics as well, including laptop computers, home appliances, air conditioners, and other products.

• The Altair-LGE team succeeded in implementing a toolset to perform a smartphone drop-test simulation from CAD to report in less than 24 hours.
• Meshing the printed circuit board (PCB) and the chips and creating solder joints between the PCB and the chips now takes less than 5 minutes, a task that manually used to take an engineer a full day.
• Complete modeling time totaled less than five hours.