Page 20 - VTE JUNE

Feature | Altair
Vehicle Level Simulation Driven Design
- A Facilitator for Light Weighting in
Vehicle Engineering
By Dr Lars Fredriksson
Business VP – Simulation Driven Innovation, Altair Engineering Europe
The automotive industry is experiencing rapidly increasing requirements on new vehicles from all directions, such as from legislation and consumers, and due to the competitive situation on the market.
Still, development cycles are continuously shortened and development costs are reduced. A demand for further improvements of the vehicle development process is continuous and pronounced, so strong that automotive OEMs are using expressions like “change of paradigm” describing the changes necessary for the future vehicle development. The core message of the new paradigm is
a stronger and more integrated cooperation between departments and functions when developing new vehicles.
Simulation Driven Design
Processes addressing the need for integration between design and CAE are often associated with the name “Simulation Driven Design”. However, simulation driven design is a very wide concept and contains many aspects of using simulations to drive design.
It is expected that this concept of developing automotive components, systems and complete vehicles will experience a significantly increasing importance during the next years see figure 1.
The requirements for efficient future design processes
The larger the structures to be developed using simulation driven design, the more care must be taken how the design process is executed and how simulation is integrated into the design process. Otherwise, CAE will not be able to influence the design as actively and as significantly as desired. Altair has identified three main areas of challenges which must be managed to be successful using simulation driven design on a vehicle, platform and BiW level;
1. theleadtimetoproviderelevantfeedback to design and release engineers,
2. theintegrationintoexistingproduct development functions, and
3. the management of the development complexity, considering all major development attributes.
To address the above challenges successfully, changes of the classical development philosophy are likely to be required, including how the OEM product development is organized.
The most significant of these changes concerns the further integration of and the cooperation between 1) different CAE attribute departments (e.g. crash and NVH) and 2) between CAE and design & release functions.
Since simulation driven design of vehicles, platforms and BiW needs to consider all important attributes simultaneously, and since it is intended to be an active design instrument, the team involved with simulation driven design must be an overlay on current organization structure accessing both CAE
attribute information and having direct access with design & release functions.
An example of such organizational integration as realized by Altair is often denoted Optimization Center and is depicted in Figure 2.
Altair simulation driven design processes
Altair simulation driven design on a vehicle, platform and BiW level is defined by Altair
as “the strategic and systematic usage of optimization to generate design alternatives, trade-off information, design sensitivities
and best balance designs to actively support the vehicle design process throughout the complete vehicle development timeline”.
The Altair simulation driven design processes are intended to be used on complete vehicle, platform and BiW structures rather than on component level and are thus supporting vehicle development strategically. These
20 | June 2018
Figure 1: The Role of Simulation Driven Design within Vehicle Development