Abstract

With ever increasing need to bring products to the market faster, at lower costs or with increased efficiency, need for virtual prototyping is rising in many companies and industries. Simulations Department in Rimac Automobili is also a product of a such need. Rimac Automobili is focused on design, engineering, and production of high-performance electric vehicle components for the global automotive industry. To be able to deliver such components, numerical simulations are extensively used. Simulations Department has been formed by combining experts for several other departments. From its early stages it has been crucial to deliver fast and accurate insights of different designs of electric vehicle powertrain and battery systems using different types of calculations. With growth of the Rimac Automobili as a company, Simulations department is expanding its capabilities, toolset, and the team to be ready for future challenges in the development of electric vehicles. Now, several years in existence, many valuable lessons, and general rules of how to build highly functional simulations team and how to develop new simulations capabilities have been learned. These lessons and rules will be presented and discussed in this presentation. There are several aspects of building simulations capability presented. One of the aspects covered in this presentation is people management and communication of both inside of the team and outside of the team. Several lessons learned from interviewing process to the communication of the results will be presented. In parallel with the building of the team, it is necessary to expand simulations software and hardware capabilities. Discussions between selections of open source versus commercial software and local hardware versus cloud computing will also be presented. Other aspect that is discussed is experimental validation of simulations’ results. Experimental validation is crucial and inseparable part of simulations process needed to increase accuracy of the results and selections of the right modeling strategies. General guidelines how to perform experimental validation will be shown. Final aspect of building simulations capabilities is simulations data management. Process from initiating simulations request to data storing will be shown and discussed. Presented lessons and rules will be shown together with real life examples from projects that Simulations Department has been working on with special focus on Rimac Automobili’s all electric hypercar Nevera.