Technology Business of the Year31 Technology Business of the Year

Technology Business of the Year

The ability to predict success is something all businesses would envy. In engineering, the ability to predict failure can also be a valuable tool.

That is the premise behind a promising new business founded by two entrepreneurs from Brazil, Leandro Castro and Flavio Souza, who earned their doctorates in engineering mechanics at the University of NebraskaLincoln.

Their company, MultiMech Research & Development LLC, provides Computer-Aided Engineering (CAE) solutions to optimize the design and manufacturing process of innovative products. Begun in August 2010, MultiMech has developed several software products that reduce the time needed to create and test a prototype.

Their efforts to date earned MultiMech the honor of being named the Nebraska Business Development Center’s Technology Business of the Year for 2011.

Castro says he and his partner have relied upon the experts at NBDC’s Omaha office for many aspects of their new business, from marketing and market research to arranging product demonstrations. “Lisa Tedesco (SBIR/ STTR consultant) and the others at NBDC have been among our strongest supporters,” he says.

Castro and Souza are designing software tools to enable engineers in a variety of industries to reduce the expense associated with trial-and-error product development, and discover the flaws that cause a product to fail prior to its designed lifecycle.

MultiMech’s Virtual Manufacturing, Testing and Optimization proprietary technologies create virtual replicas of a physical prototype. Because premature failure can often be traced to defects found at the microstructural level, the MultiMech software provides an unparalleled level of precision in the modeling of the material’s microstructure.

MultiMech’s first client is Eletrobras, a major Brazilian power utility. Castro hopes the project yields significant validation data for MultiMech’s software. He says MultiMech’s goal in the short term is to partner with companies, especially locally, to put its products to use and develop feasibility studies that help validate the technologies. “In the long term,” he says, “we want to transform this technology into an industry standard for composite analysis.”

MULTIMECH RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT LLC