Altair 2025 Enlighten Award winners, runner-ups push automotive boundaries

Altair 2025 Enlighten Award winners. Source | Altair

Altair Engineering Inc. (Troy, Mich., U.S.) has named the winners of the 2025 Altair Enlighten Award. Presented in association with the Center for Automotive Research (CAR, Ann Arbor, Mich., U.S.), the award honors sustainability and lightweighting advancements that successfully reduce carbon footprint, mitigate water and energy consumption, and leverage material reuse and recycling efforts.

“In a rapidly transforming automotive landscape, organizations must continuously push the boundaries of sustainability innovation. Throughout its 13-year history, the Enlighten Award remains the premier honor showcasing the automotive industry’s groundbreaking achievements in sustainable technology,” says Sam Mahalingam, CTO of Altair. “We are proud to once again celebrate the organizations driving a more sustainable future.”

Future of Lightweighting

Winner: Vortex CAE – Enlighten (Leicestershire, U.K.): A Novel Holistic Topometry based Optimizer for the Design of Lightweight Crash Structures

Vortex CAE’s new solver offers direct crash and impact optimizations using full fidelity models. The outputs produce holistic and pre-validated CAE solutions. Additionally, the company developed a computationally efficient 3D generative-design methodology to identify and size fundamental structural features early on. A generative design case study cut 77% from the body-in-white (BIW) mass while meeting or exceeding structural performance in 13 primary crash load cases. Assuming a 50% mass-retention loss, Vortex CAE estimate that $500 million in raw material costs for this vehicle could have been saved, along with 1.35 million tons of C02 from manufacturing alone.

Editor’s note: This technology works with composite materials, however the wing innovation description above highlights a steel structure.

Runner-Up: Magna International (Aurora, Canada): Hemp-PA6 Composite Roof Rack Inner

Magna successfully demonstrated the use of hemp nylon (PA6) in automotive exteriors, enhancing sustainability. The sustainable material replaces talc in traditional nylon resin and was developed in collaboration with BASF and Heartland. The lightweight, renewable material absorbs CO₂ during growth, supports decarbonization and delivers performance and processing equivalent to the original resin, marking a major advancement in the use of natural fibers for automotive applications.

Enabling Technology

Winner: CompositeEdge GmbH (Braunschweig, Germany) and ATA Mute B.V. (Eindhoven, Netherlands): Adaptive Ultra-Thin Noise Solution

CompositeEdge GmbH and ATA Mute B.V. have developed an acoustic element under 1 millimeter thick that offers up to 97% sound absorption, particularly at low frequencies where conventional materials are less effective. It is waterproof, fire-resistant and fully recyclable, produced without adhesives from natural, carbon or glass fibers combined with thermoplastics. The material maintains its performance in humid and high-temperature environments and is suitable for a wide range of applications such as cars, heat pumps and interior facades.

Runner-Up: Lucid Motors (Newark, Calif., U.S.): Modal Transient Analysis-based Durability CAE Workflow

Lucid Motors, in collaboration with the Altair OptiStruct development team, developed and implemented a seamless durability CAE workflow that progressed from MBD-based vehicle dynamics simulation to FEM-based strength, stiffness and fatigue analysis, and ultimately to structural optimization. The workflow could be applied to a wide range of components, including the BIW, subframes, battery pack, suspension components, powertrain and closures, using a global-local analysis approach for detailed local assessments with refined meshing.

Honorable Mention: Mercedes-Benz AG (Stuttgart, Germany) and Mercedes-Benze Research and Development India Private Ltd. (Karnataka): An Automated Sustainable Process for Generating Superelements

This fully automated process streamlines setup to just 15 minutes for complex parts, eliminates user errors and requires no manual intervention. This innovation enables agile, iterative optimizations with fast design feedback, while cutting computational demands, achieving more than 90% runtime reduction, lower hardware utilization and more efficient resource use.

Module Lightweighting

Winner: Syensqo (Brussels, Belgium) and Geely Global (Hangzhou, China): Amodel PPA Stator Cooling Systems 

Geely improved e-motor efficiency with an innovative stator cooling design using Syensqo’s short glass fiber Amodel PPA, achieving 47% weight and 36% cost savings versus metal. The metal-to-plastic conversion reduces weight, enables part integration and streamlines high-volume assembly through injection molding, laser welding and snap fits. Highly resistant to automotive fluids, Amodel PPA retains nearly 70% burst pressure resistance after 2,000 hours of aging at 150℃ ATF, ensuring safety and reliability. This design achieves precise lubrication with lower oil pump power consumption, effectively reducing the risk of overheating spots.

Runner-Up: American Axle & Manufacturing (AAM, Detroit, Mich., U.S.): Modular Lightweight Axle Housing Innovation

AAM’s modular lightweight axle housing innovation replaced two-axle configurations with a single modular design, cutting complexity and cost. Delivering up to 10% mass reduction, around 1.3 million pounds annually across 145,000 units, the design was optimized using Altair’s Multi-Model Optimization to balance weight and strength. Fully compatible with existing assembly lines and preserving back-serviceability, the solution reduces fuel consumption and emissions through material efficiency and streamlined logistics.

Sustainable Computing

Winner: Lucid Motors: Design-Driven Structural Assessment To Enable Accelerated Product Development

Lucid Motors’ Design-Driven Structural Assessment approach accelerates product development using Altair SimSolid’s meshless solver. Engineers can run rapid design iterations directly within their CAD environment, eliminating the need for complex meshing or switching tools. The highly customizable workflow streamlines setup and empowers teams to optimize designs with greater speed and ease.

Runner-Up: Mercedes-Benz AG & Mercedes-Benz Research and Development India Private Ltd.: An Automated Sustainable Process for Generating Superelements           

This fully automated process streamlines setup to just 15 minutes for complex parts, eliminates user errors and requires no manual intervention. The innovation enables agile, iterative optimizations with fast design feedback, while cutting computational demands — achieving more than 90% runtime reduction, lower hardware utilization and more efficient resource use.

Sustainable Process

Winner: Marelli (Lombardy, Italy): Adhesive Wastewater Recovery Solution

Marelli implemented a cleaning process for adhesive manufacturing equipment, such as robots and spray guns, used in bonding topcoat skins to substrates for cut, sew and wrap parts. By using a three-part chemical agent, the process separates adhesive waste from the cleaning water, enabling recovery and reuse of approximately 85% of adhesive wastewater. This process reduced the plant’s water consumption by 8,160 kilograms annually, with the recovered non-potable water able to be reused within manufacturing operations.

Runner-Up: CITIC Dicastal Co. Ltd. (Qin Huangdao City, He Bei Province, China): Key Technology for Integrated Forming of Large Aluminum Alloy Structural Components

This innovation consolidates 98 parts into a single component, reducing weight by 30% and lowering both cycle time and cost. It marks the first application of a non-heat-treated Al-Mg alloy in commercial vehicle structures. A closed-loop thermal balance system ensures consistent forming quality, while rapid process simulation and C123 variable cross-section design optimize material use and accelerate the design-to-validation cycle.

Sustainable Product

Winner: Nio Inc. (Shanghai, China) and AkzoNobel (Amsterdam, Netherlands): Bottom Plate Coating for Battery Pack to Improve Lifespan During Battery Swap for Electrical Vehicles

Nio and Akzonobel extended the lifespan of the bottom plate coating from 5 to 15 years while reducing coating thickness by 90%, cutting vehicle weight by 2.2 kilograms and developing powder coating technology for electric vehicles (EVs). The innovation replaced non-recyclable materials with recyclable alternatives, eliminated volatile organic compound (VOC) emissions, and improved coating efficiency by 55%, delivering significant sustainability benefits. Established through a unique carmaker Tier 5 partnership, this scalable solution enhanced cost and efficiency across Tiers 1 to 3 and has been mass-produced since November 2024, applied widely on Nio, onvo and Firefly EV models.

Runner-Up: Chery Automobile Co. Ltd. (Wuhu, China): Answering Earth with Low-Carbon Recycled Aluminum

Chery Automobile’s low-carbon aluminum initiative uses 100% recycled aluminum in a closed-loop system with more than 99% impurity removal and employs heat-treatment-free integrated die-casting, cutting manufacturing energy by up to 95%. Achieving over 80% reduction in raw-material carbon emissions, it meets global low-carbon standards while maintaining strength and safety, and fosters collaborative ecosystems for scalable green manufacturing.

Responsible AI

Winner: Lucid Motors: Predicting Crash Modes with Altair PhysicsAI

Lucid Motors transformed crash CAE by applying AI-driven insights to predict complex, non-linear deformation behaviors under realistic off-axis and oblique impact scenarios. By integrating Altair PhysicsAI with LS-DYNA, the company trained surrogate models to classify crash modes, such as axial crush and bending, well before physical testing. This approach reduced design iterations, minimizing prototype reliance and accelerating delivery of lightweight, crash-robust structures with high safety confidence. This scalable methodology was applied across multiple crash-critical components and contributed to sustainability by minimizing material use, reducing test waste and supporting corporate decarbonization goals.

Runner-Up: Lucid Motors: Agentic AI for Engineering Automation

Lucid Motors automated CAD data retrieval, custom script execution, analysis and reporting by implementing AI-driven natural language support, which eliminated the need to learn each individual tool. By simply stating broad concepts, the AI handled intricate details and seamlessly chained multiple applications, allowing data to flow automatically through the workflow pipeline. This approach enabled instant execution of ideas without waiting for manual intervention and avoided complex API use by automating interactions directly through the GUI.