This article featured in the October 2021 issue of the 2021 NAFEMS World Congress edition of BENCHMARK

Automation is a very important part of industry 4.0, and is equally as important in the virtual validation scenario. Traditionally, besides creating presentation files from the FE analysis results data base, CAE model building activities that are time consuming have been the core focus of automation. In most organizations, CAE SoPs (Standard operating Procedures) are already in place and this satisfies one of the important necessary conditions for initiating automation. Today, as product development cycle time is being shrunk there is more emphasis on virtual validation. This has led to more workload for CAE/FE analysts. Automation of the CAE SoP provides a bright spot for CAE/FE analysts to overcome the time crunch without any compromise to quality of results.

This article presents a novel approach to CAE process automation. We will look at automation for preparing a ready to run FE model of a clutch assembly. The clutch assembly is usually built with some parts that are discretized with hexa elements and others with a higher order tetra mesh, depending on the SoP or best practice followed by engineering teams. The process automation that is discussed here is designed to generate a ready-to-run solver input deck from input CAD data. Besides creating the analysis load steps, the process automation captures geometry clean-up tasks for clutch assembly parts, meshing clutch assembly parts as per the guidelines or SoP, assigning material properties, and creating connection as per model assembly guidelines. Smart processes to automatically define contacts and auto fix contacts are added to make it easier for engineers to save time. The process automation does require inputs from the user and they are channelled through “drag and drop” menus or User Panels that are easy to create and are part of the process automation process. The four key steps for the process automation are Record, Create UI, Plumb the Process, and Publish. Auto parameterization of the FE model facilitates the ability to add intelligence to the FE model assembly so that a what- if scenario study is made very easy. This holistic process is estimated to save time drastically, upwards of 50 percent to the CAE user, the most important point being, this process automation that the CAE user could create does not need expertise with any programming language.