This presentation was made at the NAFEMS Americas Seminar - Confidence in Engineering Simulation: The Next 10 Years of CAE in Mexico.

What is the future for engineering analysis and simulation in Mexico? Discover innovative engineering simulation processes and tools which are helping companies in Mexico improve production capabilities. Engage with domain experts, industry leaders, and peers in a focused, comprehensive one-day event that covers topics on engineering analysis, simulation, and systems modeling and simulation that every engineer in Mexico should know.

Resource Abstract

The Pre-Processing stage of a vehicle CAE Analysis based upon numerical mesh methods demands for setting up a suitable Body In White (BIW) model. Generally, this stage is performed with the aid of computational tools specifically designed to handle such a task. Depending on the complexity of the vehicle model, the time invested in carrying out the Pre-Processing may increase gradually from some hours to a couple of days turning a crucial process tedious, very laborious, and risk prone. Broadly, during the Pre-processing a CAE Engineer must accomplish BIW Geometries’ Cleaning up, Meshing, Material & Thickness assignment, and Spot-welds creation. Unfortunately, each of the steps are low value added and require tremendous effort due to the rate of time invested compared to the scheduled deliverable Milestones. Furthermore, to highlight weaknesses in a common Pre-process, the constant design updates in combination with the amount of design versions (for vehicles: 5/3 door, panoramic, steel, etc.) to be analysed, expose how the difficulty of a BIW model setting up may exponentially increase.



In this paper, a novel implementation of the Pre-Processing stage through a series of scripts is shown. Each of the steps early mentioned are coded using open source programming language coupled with third party pre-processor software. Scripts execution have highlighted not only a massive reduction in time during the Pre-processing, but also have revealed some issues in PLM software (Company database from which the Geometries are taken). A thoroughly discussion about scripting optimization, evidence of improvement in time over current scheme, and PLM software dependency drawbacks are exposed. Finally, concluding remarks about success cases using scripts, and future enhancements are presented.