This presentation was made at NAFEMS Americas Seminar "Engineering Analysis & Simulation in the Automotive Industry: Creating the Next Generation Vehicle Accurate Modelling for Tomorrow's Technologies".

The automotive engineering community is now confronting the largest technology transformation since its inception. This includes the electrification of powertrains for more efficient consumption and cleaner emissions, the reinvention of the battery with fast wireless charging capabilities and finally the advent of a fully autonomous vehicle. Compounding to these technology changes, the automotive companies design verification process is moving away from a major reliance on physical testing to almost a full virtual simulation product verification process. The challenges to the automotive engineers are enormous and require a significant increase in the upfront use of numerical simulation capabilities, methods and processes such they’re able to efficiently design, manufacture and deliver these very innovative technologies to the market in greater speeds than ever before.

Resource Abstract

Next-generation vehicles will be electrically powered, which means that the sound of the internal combustion engine will no longer be present to cover any other noise. Therefore, crafting the acoustic experience inside the car is highly important in order to sustain the level of quality perceived expected by consumers. One step towards the analysis on vehicle level is the investigation of sub-systems: Electro-magnetic forces and gear whine are leading to the noise and vibration characteristics of electric drive systems. In order to meet requirements for comfort and reliability, multi-domain analysis with linked simulations of the entire system are required. For enabling engineers to easily run trade-off studies and ultimately parametric optimizations, the holistic use of parametric models is essential. On the example of a flexible multi-body simulation including electromagnetic forces, we will show how the multi-domain analysis is carried out and how automated model updates and process execution dramatically reduce the time and effort to study numerous design alternatives.