
CAD rendering of the eRod.
Last month, at the International Manufacturing Technology Show, tens of thousands of registrants and exhibiting companies flocked to McCormick Place’s 1.2 million square feet of exhibit space. To hit the ground running, this year I checked-in with some of the larger companies early. Big companies like Siemens — with a global reach in many different spaces — are always a hot topic and I’ve found that earlier in the week is the best time to see if you can grab an interview. I was lucky enough to speak with Mattias Leinberger from Siemens’ marketing team to learn more about their focus for this year’s show.

Siemens’ Mattias Leinberger on the show floor at IMTS 2024 in Chicago.
In pre-IMTS press releases Siemens had already explained its plan to feature a digital-to-real manufacturing demonstration at its booth and to show its new high-performance eRod EV components and how they were produced. I wanted to see the noise, vibration, and harshness (NVH) optimized rim for the e-vehicle. However, I was most interested in asking Leinberger about how Siemens redesigned the eRod’s transmission housing to handle the high forces that come with the vehicle’s sport mode. Additionally, I wanted to know about noise reduction and vibration issues during deceleration. Here’s what he had to say.
“What we noticed is that that transmission is kind of noisy, especially in recuperating. That gave us the next idea for our project on our technology carrier, what part to improve. So that’s what we picked. We took the transmission housing and ran it through our simulation suite. While we did that, especially in sport mode, we discovered it was kind of weak — especially if you go in sport mode to full acceleration. We had a lot of red spots in that design there.

Optimizing the transmission housing design required integrating both pre-existing and new data into a single parametric CAD model. This allowed us to work on faceted and B-Rep data simultaneously, ensuring all changes were updated across the entire model. The result was a more streamlined design process with fewer errors and faster production readiness.
…So, we make it stronger, we make it less noisy, get some of the resonance frequencies out, and enhance it a little bit. That was the start of the whole idea of going through an end-to-end process down to personally installing it and testing the new transmission on that car. We went through engineering simulation, from acoustic optimization to standard force optimization.”
I also asked Leinberger to touch on generative design. Decades ago, there was a certain amount of guesswork involved in a design. How has that changed? Or has it at all?
“Your typical thin wall housing… it was all guesswork. You did that by experience, right? We had some other mold makers here saying, ‘Yeah, that’s how it would come out of my CAD system, right?’ That’s what I would do. I put my bearing holders in here, and create some stiffness here, and hope that it’s all good…'” Well, the days of hoping are over. We can simulate, we can optimize it, and we’ve had quite a few iterations in here, and that’s why you want that all on one team, one center — data, backbone… actually, the whole team was working here.”
Having a platform where Siemens engineers from around the world could collaborate without traveling was crucial to the project.
“On a team center, backbone, in a managed mode — we put that on a server. It actually was in Germany, sitting in Germany. So they work here remotely on a server in Germany, some out of Ann Arbor, the next one out of St Louis. The other one sits in California. They all work on that remote thing because there are iterations — quite a few. The guy in Italy comes back, ‘Well, you added some material or a stiffener here. It didn’t help my 6k resonance frequency. I need something different, right?’ So try better. You go back, and that actually takes a month or two, right, until we got the design really right.”
Leinberger pointed out a spot where you could see where they had added some surface lattice on top to dampen especially the first bearing, where the incoming shaft drive was a small sprocket. “Just 11 teeth you get up to. You have a pressure angle of 42°, which is really steep, and that’s making noise, right? It’s noisy. So we go into a first manufacturing validation. So you have your CNC machine ready. But then you see… it doesn’t fit through the gate. It’s too large. You need a different machine. And you don’t want to discover that back down here. You want to know that very fast, from the first moment upfront. Before you even talk to a manufacturer. Then we make a project plan and go into operations management, where all your assets and equipment and scheduling are done.
From start to finish the whole project only took around 6 months. Beginning as just an idea for a new project in February 2024, the finished product moved quickly because of the collaborative nature of the process. Leinberger says it could have been even faster if the all-volunteer team did not have other work responsibilities. He said that ultimately, the speed of this volunteer effort was the technology available to them and that the project was fun, collaborative, and interesting.
“We really had fun. I cannot tell you how excited the team is knowing that this is not just a demo. We made a part. It’s to specification, it’s within tolerance, and it works, you know? Everybody can do a demo. That’s easy.”
Siemens
www.sw.siemens.com
Filed Under: ENGINEERING SOFTWARE