These slides were presented at the NAFEMS World Congress 2025, held in Salzburg, Austria from May 19–22, 2025.

Abstract

DENSO is a leading, global automotive supplier with a thermal development center near Munich for the North-European market. The development process is heavily based on simulation and therefore, in 2017, the HVAC simulation team started to fully automate their CFD workflow. The process automation was developed in-house. The input is tessellated sub-parts of the HVAC components. Pre-processing, solving and post-processing are controlled by a wizard-type GUI and performed using STAR-CCM+. This approach increased quality and efficiency of the CFD workflow significantly. The digital simulation methods become the leading tools in the product development area and therefore the number of total simulation activities were significantly increased through the years. Faced with this high number of simulation data, the traditional handling was not satisfying internal and external requirements anymore. Data transfer from design to simulation was not fully traceable. It required many manual working steps which were prone to error. Therefore, linking the CAD design and CFD simulation data in the existing Siemens Teamcenter PLM system was the consistent next step for the development process. Teamcenter Simulation provides an open interface to connect any kind of simulation tools, including 3rd party products and in-house developments. This is important as the existing automation should not be replaced. The existing CFD workflow is Linux based and makes use of extended JAVA script automation. It was required to connect the tool nearly untouched during the first Teamcenter Simulation introduction phase. An important difference of the new process is that the simplified simulation geometries for the airflow volume are now created as associated CAD parts instead of isolated geometries as before. The data transfer to all CAE tools is now managed by a Teamcenter workflow which also includes a feedback loop for corrections and final freeze status release. CAE BOMs for different simulation setups can be created by structure mapping. As before, the tool ANSA is used to then create the surface meshes from the simulation geometries, followed by the CFD automated simulation setup and execution in STAR-CCM+. But now, those steps are fully integrated into the Teamcenter workflow to establish the Digital Thread from end to end. This traceability allows the rising number of simulations to be efficiently performed while avoiding expensive errors due to data inconsistencies. The base implementation is successfully finished and future transformation steps will be defined within first productive phase of Teamcenter Simulation. The vision of DENSO is to integrate the total CFD simulation workflow as well as other CAE workflows to Teamcenter. Unclear is from today'™s point of view if the JAVA integration will stay alive or be replaced by a newer tool integration within the next years.