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

The automotive industry is experiencing dramatic changes. Major shifts of markets, stringent legislative requirements and highly varying consumer demands have created unprecedented challenges to automobile manufacturers. The electrification and hybridization of powertrains, along with further optimization of combustion engines, are forward-looking steps to satisfy this demand. Although it is already possible to travel short distances 100% electrically, powertrains still need high efficiency to reach large electrical driving range and low CO2 emissions; therefore even bigger advances in the development of e-motor, battery life and fuel cells are needed to place more electrically-powered vehicles on the road.



Frontloading of development tasks and the networking of development environments offer huge potential for increasing development efficiency. Applying a model-based development approach helps to speed up the vehicle development process. Models developed to predict vehicle performance can be directly used and refined with a real powertrain on testbed. This validated model of a lead variant can then be used again in the virtual world to develop control functions, or to start implementing case calibrations for new and upcoming variants, helping to dramatically reduce iterations in the development cycle. Detailed specification, analysis and optimization of electrical systems and their components (such as e-motor, batteries and fuel cells) under completely new operating conditions can be accomplished via 3D simulation, reducing cost and supporting seamless interaction between system and component level simulation environments.



The presented work gives insights in the application of simulation power through combination and integration of commercially available software tools, analysis methods and testing into seamless workflows (AVL eSUITE™) to support engineering tasks on the electrification of powertrain. These tasks include concept, layout analysis, optimization and integration from a system level, to detailed 3D component analysis, focusing on electrical, mechanical, thermal and acoustic aspects.