Endurica software tracks product health

CLEVELAND—Will Mars' company, Endurica L.L.C., is changing how rubber product owners track and protect the health of their assets with its Digital Twin applications.

Where most of the simulations that are run on the development side of the business, asset owners can use the Digital Twin to do calculations to predict a product's durability, he said at the International Elastomer Conference, held recently in Cleveland.

The application works similar to a Fitbit, as it takes measurements and does simple calculations to give him an idea of its health, said Mars, founder and president of Endurica.

"If you own an offshore platform that has this complicated structure and rubber bearings and so on, those are expensive platforms," Mars said. "You want a way to be able to monitor the health of your structure and be able to do maintenance not just periodically because we said so, but on the basis of what kind of actual damage the structure has gone through."

In Mars' example, in a year like 2017 when a hurricane comes through and puts the structure under heavy stress, "Now you want to ask the question, 'How much life is left in my structure?'"

A Digital Twin would use load recordings from around the structure to feed data into a simulation to understand how those stresses affected the product, he said.

"The simulation becomes a way to manage assets in the field in an operational way," Mars said. "The idea of a Digital Twin is that a physical asset has a digital copy that gets updated based on sensor readings and simulations."

Working with rubber products sometimes can provide a challenge in embedding sensors to create a smarter product, as opposed to metal products that are more rigid, Mars said. For a product like a tire, the load sensor could be on the axle.

"So you know the load that's going into the tire because you're measuring it from the axle. But what you really want to know is the damage that's happening inside the tire where you can't put a sensor," said Mars. "Well, then you run a simulation."

The software includes a new feature that allows for incremental updating, making regular recordings from a sensor and running simulations based on the load just for one day or updating with additional recordings over time, Mars said.

"Every day you could run a little simulation, and every day the part gets more and more damaged," he said. "What this new feature does is it allows anybody who wants to do a Digital Twin of a rubber part can do durability tests with it. We've got the code that lets you do that."

The Digital Twin is one way Endurica is expanding its connections within the rubber industry, as a software developer for material testing. The company partnered with automotive supplier Tenneco Inc. this year to provide testing software to improve speed and accuracy in development at Tenneco's Milan facility.

"In order to get a product out to market, there's certain qualification criteria you have to pass. With my software, we're specifically focused on durability," he said. "I always tell people, of all the things you have to pass, durability is the most expensive one. By definition it means burning up lots of time on very expensive machines and taking the only experimental part you've got and breaking it. And if you're wrong, that's another year of your tech center's time to find the next thing to test."

Working with Tenneco was a chance to show what the software could do, as the company integrated it into their work, Mars said.

"They've said, 'This is not a toy, this is part of our production.' When they make something, it goes through that process," Mars said.

Using software simulations can speed up the process of getting a product to market, Mars said.

"You put in six months to pick your compound and make your mold, then you put another three months for durability testing," Mars said. "You still have to qualify your parts, but we can get rid of unnecessary iteration on durability. There's a cost savings there, and a time savings."

In Tenneco's validation case, the Endurica software was able to get within 40 percent of the product's life, Mars said.

Company growth

Mars began Endurica in 2008, after a few papers he had written as a doctoral student were cited in a U.S. military call for proposals for fatigue analysis on tank track pads. He was working in a research group for Cooper Tire & Rubber Co., and worked with his management to proceed writing a proposal himself.

His work was funded, and he started an L.L.C., leaving Cooper Tire two years later. Cooper is not involved in the current company, though it does keep a perpetual royalty-free license to use Endurica's software.

Currently, Endurica's business is about 40 percent software licensing, along with other projects and material characterization, Mars said. The license covers one person per year, and the company offers a network license to share among several employees. In Tenneco's case, the company brought in a new employee to learn and apply the software to the processes.

Endurica has seen the most uptake from automotive applications, as well as oil and gas. His goal is to reach the tire industry, despite the idea that many larger companies already have invested in internal capabilities similar to what Endurica provides, Mars said. His argument is that working with a smaller organization like his for durability testing will be more cost-effective long term than maintaining an internal team.

One way he's approaching tire companies is with a new feature of the software that will allow producers to model the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards, which requires a schedule of various distances and loads throughout the test.

"With this new feature, we now allow people to model multiple-step tests, which means you'll be able to model the FMVSS," he said. "I'm trying to break down the door into the tire world, and that was another driver in this new feature in our code."

Endurica continues to grow, with six employees now including Mars, even just with its current drive for non-tire business.

"I sense with the big tire companies that they're taking an attitude of 'Let's wait and see.' So I'm focusing on non-tire," Mars said. "We're going to prove our stuff elsewhere, and at some point, people will do what makes the most sense."