This presentation was made at the NAFEMS Americas "Creating the Next Generation Vehicle" held on the 14th of November in Troy.

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 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.

Resource Abstract

Automation is very important part of industry 4.0. It is no different in the virtual validation scenario. Traditionally CAE model building activities that are time consuming has been core focus of automation besides creating presentation files from the FE analysis results data base. In most of the organizations CAE SoP’s (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. In this paper effort is being made to explain novel approach to CAE process automation. The paper looks at automation for preparing ready to run FE model of clutch assembly. The Clutch assembly is usually built with some parts that are discretized with hexa elements and others with higher order tetra mesh. This depends on the SoP or best practice followed by engineering teams. The process automation that is discussed in this paper is designed to generate ready to run solver input deck from input CAD data. 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, creating connection as per model assembly guidelines besides creating the analysis load steps. Smart processes to automatically define contacts and auto fix contacts are being 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 key four steps for the process automation are Record, Create UI, Plumb the Process and Publish. Auto parameterization of the FE model provides ability to add intelligence to the FE model assembly so that 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. Most important point being this process automation that CAE user could create does not need expertise with any programming language.