Capabilities: simulation and test solutions

Computational fluid dynamics

The real-world performance of many products depends on their interaction with fluids, either gases, liquids or a combination of both. Computational fluid dynamics simulation offers the ability to simulate and predict flow and heat transfer behavior. However, in a world of ever-increasing product complexity, understanding a product’s fluid dynamics and heat transfer performance in an isolated manner is no longer sufficient.

To turn the complexity into a competitive advantage, today’s CFD engineers need to be able to model a wide range of fluid-related physics, from reacting flows to aeroacoustics, from multiphase flows to particle dynamics, from electronics cooling to aerodynamics.

Simcenter fluids and thermal simulation software allow you to predict the most complex fluid dynamics problems virtually and turn your insights into product innovation.

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Automated meshing technology

Accurate performance predictions rely on accurate geometry representations in your CFD simulations. In a world that is constantly increasing the pace to bring products to market, you need to prepare your geometry and computational meshes for CFD simulation in record time. Fast, robust, repeatable, high-fidelity, automated meshing technology plays a key role in going faster.

With cutting-edge technology, Simcenter fluids and thermal software allows you to simulate real-world behavior on real-world geometry with high-fidelity surface representations.

CAD-embedded CFD

Computer-aided design (CAD)-embedded CFD is a key technology in understanding the impact of changes in the geometry or boundary conditions on the fluid dynamics and thermal performance early in the development process. A CAD-embedded CFD technology enables design engineers to conduct fast and frequent what-if analyses, and generate insightful reports inside their preferred CAD platform, to direct the design process.

Simcenter puts the power of computational fluid dynamics simulation into the hands of every design engineer. Use CAD-embedded CFD directly in NX, Creo, CATIA V5 or Solid Edge in order to explore the full potential of your ideas quickly, without disrupting your design process.

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Efficient CFD design exploration

To innovate faster, engineers need to efficiently explore design alternatives and turn simulation data into actionable insight. This requires both scalable design exploration and advanced data analysis capabilities.
Simcenter enables end-to-end CFD insight generation by combining automated simulation workflows, design exploration tools, and advanced postprocessing and visualization.

Flexible and scalable deployment

Computational fluid dynamics is a resource intense simulation method. Depending on the complexity of the CFD simulation at hand, engineers need to be able to choose the most suitable hardware to run their simulation, from a local workstation to a large high-performance computer (HPC) on the cloud. The challenge for CFD engineers is to go faster while ensuring cost and energy efficiency. This can only be achieved with highly scalable, yet flexible, computing solutions and licensing models.

Simcenter offers you fast, flexible and scalable CFD solutions so you can run your CFD problem on the most suitable hardware configuration for a given project. Run a quick job on your workstation, leverage cloud computation, or seamlessly switch between central process unit (CPU)) and graphics processing unit (GPU)-enabled acceleration of CFD simulations. Benefit from innovative, affordable and customizable licensing options to meet your specific simulation needs for any given CFD project.

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To engineer innovation, CFD engineers must speed up decision-making with advanced data analysis. In the end, your design decisions often come down to “numbers of merit” and you make significant design decisions based on maximum temperatures, drag coefficients or minimum velocities. When you need access to these numbers, you need them fast. 

But in a world of ever-increasing complexity, CFD post-processing must go beyond numbers to better communicate the performance of your designs in their natural environment to all relevant stakeholders.

For these reasons, Simcenter offers a comprehensive suite of CFD post-processing capabilities to quickly and easily analyze complex simulations. Extract valuable insight from complex data, understand non-intuitive results, identify cause and effect in product performance, and easily compare multiple designs to ultimately make better data-driven decisions. The high-performance visualization and virtual reality capabilities enable rapid design decisions and increase the visibility of results to all stakeholders through powerful engineering storytelling.

Electronics cooling simulation

Thermal design of electronics is critical to developing reliable products that meet cost and performance goals. With increasing complexity, miniaturization and higher power density, engineers must predict temperature and fluid flow accurately. They must also evaluate cooling from early development stages in order to design efficient thermal management solutions for heat dissipation.

The Simcenter portfolio includes leading CFD software with specific electronics cooling simulation capabilities for chip package level, printed circuit board (PCB), rack and enclosures to large datacenters.

Simcenter supports faster time to market, eliminating board re-spins and reducing prototyping costs for air and liquid-cooled electronics by modeling convection, conduction, radiation and solar loading. Simcenter thermal test solutions support package thermal model calibration to achieve the highest accuracy.

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To enable materials innovation in today’s face-paced environment, access to a computational chemistry toolbox covering the entire hierarchy of material scales is essential. Fast and accurate prediction of physico-chemical properties of complex mixtures can be a game changer for both material development and to increase the fidelity of fluid dynamics simulations.

Simcenter provides industry-leading computational chemistry software for fast and accurate prediction of chemical reaction processes and material properties. With its unique architecture, engineers have the ability to model systems from the quantum to the mesoscale in one solution, offering a fast and accurate digital representation of their systems’ material formulations and bridging the gap to continuum descriptions of fluid and thermal behavior.

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Covering the broadest range of industry applications and engineering tasks while conforming to the latest international standards, our acoustic testing solutions adjust to your project’s requirements. Design innovative products with a compelling acoustic signature, relying on the expertise nested in Simcenter Testlab.

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There is a lot of hardware involved when testing and measuring. No matter where your hardware comes from, your requirements are always similar: you expect it to be easy to setup, robust, flexible, precise and reliable. Streamline your purchase, testing and maintenance processes by selecting hardware from a partner that supplies end-to-end solutions for your multiphysics testing requirements, from sensors and exciters to comprehensive data acquisition, analysis and reporting solutions.

Our extensive range of miniature shakers and sound sources, third-party transducers and sensors, data acquisition hardware, and sound source localization solutions are designed to help you set up and carry out tests faster and more efficiently than before.

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Rely on our end-to-end durability testing solution to streamline your entire testing process. Simcenter uniquely integrates rugged and reliable data acquisition hardware with comprehensive processing and analysis software features. Our solution covers every step of a typical test campaign, from channel setup and measurements to validation, consolidation, analysis and reporting.

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A sound understanding of the advanced materials used in innovative products is essential for fast and responsive product development. Our materials testing solutions accurately characterize the mechanical and acoustic properties of new and innovative materials and components. This feeds simulation models, allows comparing between different materials, or helps to improve existing products.

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Accelerate systems engineering by integrating test and simulation tools. Maximize consistency of tools and methods used throughout the entire development cycle. By integrating test and simulation in a single environment for validation of product performance, testing costs and risks can be reduced, productivity increased and extra system insight gained. Model-based system testing maximizes the consistency of used tools and methods while providing a highly agile mechatronic system engineering environment. It also enables attribute-specific evaluation using virtual models, combined virtual-physical models and physical prototypes.

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Efficiently assess the acoustic signature of products, in real operating conditions and in the shortest delays. Our intuitive and scalable operational noise vibration and harshness (NVH) testing solution helps you perform fast and reliable measurements, from troubleshooting activities to multiphysics test campaigns. Make NVH assessment more cost-effective by combining a scalable acquisition hardware with state-of-the-art processing and analysis software.

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Safety matters throughout the product lifecycle, from input to design, production to quality assurance, and finally your customer's assembly floors and shop shelves. In our safety testing services at Helmond, The Netherlands, are EN ISO/IEC 17025 accredited (Registration no. L547) and designated for certification by RDW (E4) and KBA (E1) accredited test center, we offer a wide range of safety components and systems tests: from helmets to complete restraint systems. Along with development testing, we offer the final and independent verification of your product’s compliance against worldwide standards.

In addition to testing specific safety components, we offer testing for overall vehicle safety. With over 30 years of experience, we provide simulation software and complementary knowledge and tools for developing, engineering, testing and validating various passive and active safety systems. Our test facilities are fully equipped to perform a whole range of tests for automotive applications, both indoor and outdoor.

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Perform robust and reliable quality testing during manufacturing. Simcenter Anovis combines all necessary sensors, accurate sound and vibration signal recording hardware, smart signal analysis, and flexible test bench control software to precisely perform pass or fail checks and to deliver a formal proof that the part meets its specifications or that the machine operates safely.

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Our rotating machinery testing solutions allow NVH engineers to optimize the performance of rotating machinery, by acquiring and analyzing the impact of speed, torque and control strategies on sound quality, (torsional) vibrations and energy efficiency. In the lab and in the field, our multi-disciplinary testing system saves time, increases data reliability and maximizes insights into the machinery’s behavior.

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Select a comprehensive solution for shock and vibration testing that ranges from routine vibration qualification tools to an effective, high-speed multi-channel closed-loop shaker control systems with parallel data acquisition and powerful analysis capabilities.

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Benefit from a tradition of cutting-edge engineering expertise and maximize your testing efficiency when performing impact testing on small structures, running large-scale campaigns with hundreds of measurement channels, or validating 3D finite element models with experimental data. Understand how a component or product assembly reacts under load with digital image correlation (DIC) technology. Measure full-field 3D displacement, strain and acceleration everywhere at once, under any load, with only a pair of cameras for faster and more responsive development cycles.

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The family of thermal characterization hardware solutions provides component and systems suppliers with the ability to accurately and efficiently test, measure and thermally characterize semiconductor integrated circuit packages, single and arrayed LEDs, stacked and multi-die packages, power electronics modules, thermal interface material (TIM) properties and complete electronic systems.

Our hardware solutions directly measure the actual heating or cooling curves of packaged semiconductor devices, continuously and in real time, rather than artificially composing it from the results of several individual tests. Measuring the true thermal transient response in this way is far more efficient and accurate, leading to more accurate thermal metrics than steady-state methods. Measurements only need to be performed once per sample, rather than repeated with an average taken as with steady-state methods.

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Quantify the various sources and their paths and figure out which ones are important and which ones cancel each other out. Perform transfer path analysis (TPA) to identify and assess structure-borne and airborne energy transfer routes, from the excitation source to a given receiver location. TPA quantifies the various sources and their paths and figures out which ones contribute the most to the noise issues and which ones cancel each other out. From the quantified and modeled sources and paths, it becomes a relatively straightforward design task to optimize vibro-acoustic and the noise, vibration, and harshness (NVH) performance of the system.

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The amount of data that is produced in a testing department is enormous. Converting, visualizing and analyzing test data results are time-consuming tasks and often require specific application knowledge. Simcenter Testlab applications are the perfect tools to streamline data acquisition, analytics and reporting.

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System simulation platform

Simcenter Systems offers state-of-the-art, open and user-friendly multiphysics system simulation platforms to model, run and analyze complex systems and components. The powerful features, analysis and optimization tools are embedded in advanced and easy-to-use environments for highly efficient 1D multiphysics system simulation and robust design. It efficiently interfaces with many 1D and 3D computer-aided engineering (CAE) software solutions and helps you quickly derive and export models for standard real-time targets by providing a consistent and continuous model-in-the-loop (MiL), software-in-the-loop (SiL) and hardware-in-the-loop (HiL) capable framework.

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Electrical system simulation

Simulate and integrate electrical and electromechanical systems from concept design to control validation. Simcenter Systems helps optimize the dynamic performance of mechatronic systems, analyze power consumption, and design and validate control laws for electrical devices for the automotive, aerospace, industrial machinery, marine and heavy equipment industries.

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Fluid system simulation

Optimize the dynamic behavior of hydraulic and pneumatic components while limiting physical prototyping to what's strictly necessary. With a wide choice of components, features and application-oriented tools, Simcenter Systems allows you to model fluid systems for a wide range of applications, such as mobile hydraulic actuation systems, powertrain systems or aircraft fuel and environmental control systems.

Comprehensive component libraries support occasional and expert users when modeling fluid systems, from functional to detailed models. The seamless integration between libraries enables the design of any fluid system and the coupling with controls and other related systems in a single platform.

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Mechanical system simulation

Manage the increasing engineering complexity of integrated mechanical systems. Simcenter Systems offers state-of-the-art modeling techniques that allow multi-dimensional (1D, 2D and 3D) dynamic simulations. It enables you to study rigid or flexible bodies and complex non-linear frictions by analyzing low- or high-frequency phenomena and taking into account coupling between mechanical structures and electric or hydraulic motion.

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Thermal system simulation

Simcenter Systems helps maximize thermal performance for HVAC and cabin comfort, vehicle thermal management, environmental control systems or other thermal systems. Advanced post-processing features that graphically visualize energy flows in your system make it highly effective to optimize energy efficiency and to study the integration of energy recovery systems and their impact on performance and energy consumption.

You can use the software to represent the real operating environment of your system, including interactions with surroundings when designing and validating your temperature control strategies.

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Propulsion system simulation

Address various architectures and technologies with the multiphysics system simulation approach. Powertrain electrification in automotive, reusable launch systems for the space industry, or the use of alternative fuels (LNG) for ships are examples of technology implementation that the modeling capabilities of Simcenter can support.

You will be able to design and assess the impact of the propulsion system on various metrics, such as onboard power generation or vehicle pollutant emissions, by performing a complete analysis of cross-system influences in a single platform.

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Optimize the efficiency of your thermo-fluid systems while ensuring they always operate safely. With Simcenter systems, you can simulate the dynamic behavior of thermo-fluid systems of any size and complexity, analyze complex physical phenomena that are critical for safe and efficient operation, and reuse the digital twin system during the operation phase for real-time monitoring for maximum efficiency and safety.

Simcenter systems allow you to size and balance your industrial gas systems, plant cooling systems, Rankine cycle systems for power generation, marine ballast systems, or large distribution systems and pipelines, all while reducing cost and accelerating time to market.

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System integration and reduced-order models (ROM)

Simcenter Systems integrates various simulation tools throughout the system lifecycle, enhancing digital continuity and workflow efficiency. It supports connections to PLM systems, co-simulations, design space exploration, model-based controls development and interactions using the functional mockup interface (FMI).

Additionally, Simcenter supports the creation of ROM with techniques from machine learning, linear algebra and statistics, enabling real-time operation as executable digital twins for better decision-making and operational excellence.

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Simcenter supports the creation of reduced-order models (ROM) in an intuitive interface, providing the best reduction techniques from machine learning, linear algebra and statistics.

A ROM has a small memory footprint, is tool-agnostic and can be operated in real-time, allowing for usage as an executable digital twin in all phases of the product lifecycle – enabling better decisions and improved operational excellence.

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Simcenter System Analyst is a collaborative solution that helps to maximize return on investments for the model development effort, by sharing models and expanding model usage throughout your company. This leads to better collaboration with all stakeholders in product development and project management.

Leveraging the modeling efforts done by model authors and domain experts, Simcenter System Analyst allows system architects to prepare model architectures and libraries, as well as specific pre- and post-processing. For project teams, it allows the use of the same models and architectures to evaluate hundreds of system variations with design options, and balance mechatronic systems’ performances to meet specific project requirements without compromising quality and performance.

Simcenter System Analyst can be deployed by any type of industrial company and ensures model continuity without changing the toolchain.

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System simulation data management

The Simcenter system simulation client for git option helps all the actors of the system simulation community to work collaboratively, supplying the daily management of simulation assets, including branching, versioning and role-based access control.

Using the client for git also allows you to keep track of dependencies, related content and all other data that is part of the model, so you have a precise representation of the system simulation domain.

Deploy collaborative model development most efficiently with the help of optimized data transfers and search algorithms combined with an efficient and fully integrated user experience.

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The simulation process includes steps for model preparation, often called pre-processing, and results analysis, often called post-processing. Pre-processing steps include importing, defeaturing and cleaning up computer-aided design (CAD) geometry, creating the finite element (FE) mesh, defining loads and boundary conditions as well as solution parameters. Pre-processing is often the longest, most time-consuming step in the simulation process. 

Simcenter offers the tools you need to reduce the time you spend preparing analysis models and spend more time evaluating results. Quickly move from multi-CAD geometry data to a complete, run-ready analysis model using unique tools for computer-aided engineering (CAE) geometry editing, comprehensive meshing, FE assembly management, multi-CAE solver environments, and fast simulation results post-processing and reporting. Efficiently pre- and post-process your simulation models quickly for accurate and fast simulation solvers so you can spend more time engineering innovation.

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Understanding how a component or product assembly reacts under stress or vibration is critical in any industry. However, as products and materials become increasingly complex, engineers need tools that go beyond linear-statics analyses. Simcenter provides the structural analysis software you need to simulate a wide range of applications all within a single user environment. You no longer need one tool for linear statics, another to study fatigue and yet another for nonlinear analysis. As a result, engineering departments can consolidate structural analysis tools and you only need to know a single user interface.

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Most machines and vehicles experience vibrations and other excitations that can impact their structural performance. Historically, physical testing methods were used for understanding the structural dynamics of various products. However, testing is costly and time-consuming and perhaps not very feasible with large structures like aircraft or ships. Simulation has become a key technology in understanding the structural dynamics of automobiles, spacecraft, jet engines, ships, electronic devices and industrial machines.

Simcenter offers a comprehensive solution to understand, analyze and improve the response when a system is subjected to dynamic loading. Simcenter builds on over 50 years of dynamics analysis experience to offer you the ability to efficiently understand and avoid excessive vibrations and stresses. Dedicated capabilities are available for noise, vibration and harshness (NVH) engineering, rotor dynamics and correlation.

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Are your customers expecting quieter products? Are competitors gaining ground by using sound quality as a differentiator? Will tighter noise regulations impact your product sales? Would you like to decrease the time spent on predicting sound fields or shave off weeks on complex jobs like engine run-ups?

Acoustic software helps you conquer these challenges. Simcenter offers interior and exterior acoustic simulation within an integrated solution that helps you make informed decisions during the early design stages so you can optimize your product’s acoustic performance. A unified and scalable modeling environment combined with efficient solvers and easy-to-interpret visualization capabilities enables you to quickly gain insight into the acoustic performance of your product.

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Undoubtedly the most challenging task for durability engineers is designing fail-safe components and systems in the most efficient manner. System parts with insufficient fatigue strength may cause permanent structural damage and potentially life-threatening situations. Mistakes can cause product recalls which negatively influence not only the product but the overall brand image. Shorter development cycles and ever-increasing quality requirements have stretched test-based durability approaches to the limits. Evaluating and refining the durability performance by simulating, using durability software methods, is the only valid alternative.

Simcenter gives you access to state-of-the-art fatigue analysis methods that enable you to perform fatigue life prediction analyses quickly and accurately accounting for realistic loading conditions.

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Understanding the engineering performance is challenging for intricate mechanical systems, like wing flaps or landing gears, sliding sunroofs or suspensions, or photocopiers and other mechanisms. Motion simulation uses multibody dynamics to calculate the reaction forces, torques, velocities, acceleration and more for mechanical systems. You can directly convert CAD geometry and assembly constraints into an accurate motion model or create your own multibody model from scratch. The embedded motion solver and robust post-processing capabilities allow you to study of a broad range of mechanism behaviors.

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The tire is a complex and highly non-linear vehicle component that has a significant effect on the behavior of a vehicle. As the number of vehicle models on the market continues increasing, so does the number of possible use cases that need to be tested and validated. This fact, in combination with the need for reduced development times, calls for ever more simulation instead of physical vehicle testing.

Modeling tire performance requires a lot of expertise and specialization. For this purpose, Simcenter offers engineers scalable and customized solutions. The ultimate goal is simulation to accurately represent tire forces and moments, so they can be propagated to various vehicle performance simulations.

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Thermal management is a major consideration for a wide range of products, including industrial machinery, automobiles and consumer electronics. The objective of any thermal management solution is to maintain a product’s temperature within a range that is optimal for performance. Accomplishing this may require the removal or addition of heat, either passively or in an actively managed fashion and this can be evaluated using thermal simulation software.

Simcenter includes comprehensive, best-in-class thermal simulation capabilities that can help you understand the thermal characteristics of your product and subsequently tailor your thermal management solution for optimal performance.

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An uncomfortable truth about modern engineering is that there really are no easy problems left to solve. In order to meet the demands of industry, it’s no longer good enough to do a bit of CFD or some stress analysis. Complex industrial problems require solutions that span a multitude of physical phenomena, which often can only be solved using simulation techniques that cross several engineering disciplines.

Simcenter can help you streamline multiphysics simulation so that you can more accurately simulate real-world conditions.

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Additive manufacturing (AM) is changing the way products are made. New revolutionary machines and processes are rapidly pushing AM from the prototype environment onto the production floor. The additive manufacturing capabilities in Simcenter help you predict distortions and defects before parts are printed, thereby reducing the number of test prints and improving the quality of the final print.

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Occupant and pedestrian safety are critical design aspects. These aspects determine whether a vehicle can be homologated. Therefore, thorough prototype testing needs to be done before a vehicle can go to market. However, this testing is expensive and can cause significant delays, especially when problems are discovered. For this reason, vehicle manufacturers try to save prototyping time and cost by doing upfront research and analysis using simulation.

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To stay ahead in the innovation race, engineers need to be able to quickly predict the outcome of design changes on the real-world performance of their product. Engineering simulation provides an excellent way for you to cost-effectively evaluate how your products will perform under expected operating conditions.

Design exploration and optimization solutions take simulation to the next level yielding new, innovative product designs that result in exceptional performance.

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