Japanese Manufacturer Pioneers Energy-Efficient Industrial Heating Systems with Rescale

JTEKT Thermo Systems has been a world-leading manufacturer of industrial heating systems since 1967. Throughout its history, innovation has been the essential component of the organization’s success.

In order to remain at the forefront of its industry, JTEKT must continually improve its heating systems, ovens, and furnaces for the automotive, semiconductor, energy, and communications markets. 

But now JTEKT faces perhaps its biggest challenge. It must make its industrial heating systems cleaner and more energy efficient. Any breakthroughs in how manufacturers use energy-intensive heating systems can mean a big step forward in creating greener industrial processes.

At the same time, it must continue to drive down its engineering and manufacturing costs while building even more innovative heating systems to build market share and customer satisfaction.

To address these challenges, JTEKT partnered with Rescale to innovate much more quickly and efficiently, speeding its pace of innovation by as much as 75 percent.

Making Manufacturing More Sustainable

Manufacturing companies across industries are striving to drive efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and lower power consumption. Such initiatives are critical to meeting environmental needs and consumer demand for more sustainable manufacturing operations. 

At the same time, digital simulation and analysis models that guide modern research are becoming increasingly sophisticated, giving organizations new tools for finding answers to today’s most difficult climate challenges.

JTEKT currently conducts analysis in four areas: thermo-fluid analysis, structural analysis, heat treatment analysis, and induction heating analysis. Such computational engineering requires highly parallel calculations on the fastest computing architectures possible. In other words, supercomputers. 

“We have always been industry leaders, focused on making the best heating systems in the world,” says Ryosuke Yamamoto, manager of JTEKT’s industrial heating unit. “But in recent years, the market and our customers have been demanding carbon neutral products. This has meant we need to speed up the product development process with digital engineering. This will be critical in helping find breakthrough innovations that reduce our customers’ carbon footprint.”

How Rescale Helped with High Performance Computing

JTEKT adopted the Rescale Platform in 2018 to quickly connect its R&D teams to the world’s most powerful high performance computing systems and cutting-edge software. At the same time, Rescale provided an easy way for JTEKT’s IT team to automate service requests for access to computing resources, track usage, and ensure cost-controls across multiple teams.

Rescale is now also helping JTEKT run more sustainable computing operations. Rescale’s platform intelligence makes it easy for the company’s IT team to identify the most energy-efficient computing services.

“JTEKT is committed to helping build a sustainable society,” Yamamoto says. “We are working not only on larger scale analysis but also on speeding up and improving the efficiency of analysis using AI. And Rescale helps us easily access the best hardware and software computing resources we need to drive those innovations.”

In addition, Rescale supports the most important international security and compliance standards. Rescale consultants helped JTEKT set up automated security and access policies tailored to the company’s specific needs.

Faster Innovation with Lower R&D Costs

With Rescale, JTEKT is innovating faster and more cost-effectively, boosting its efforts to build more sustainable manufacturing technologies.

Large-scale calculations that previously took the company’s research teams four days to run in its on-premises data center now take only a day, reducing their downtime waiting on calculations by 75 percent. 

JTEKT’s researchers also only need to conduct half as many prototype experiments to verify new designs, helping engineering teams identify carbon-reducing innovations more quickly.

In its search for cleaner, more efficient manufacturing, JTEKT relies on Rescale to provide all the computational power and software it needs to reimagine what’s possible.