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

In order to improve responsiveness of simulation teams, companies in automotive, aerospace, and other industries must reduce analysis turnaround time. Process automation and more efficient collaboration of work between designers and analysts are possible solutions to achieve this reduction.



A new-age simulation software which supports automation coupled with modern build process and simulation data and process management (SDPM) system enables this efficient collaboration between analysts and designers.



A modern build process can automate many steps such as simplification of geometry, intelligent identification and meshing of geometry features, application of connections and model assembly, application of boundary conditions and finally the generation of solver input decks.



Simulation data and process management (SDPM) systems can provide complete traceability from product performance requirements to simulation results and reports through a collaborative environment for designers and analysts across the enterprise to manage and automate simulation tasks and processes.



This paper demonstrates how CAE departments can speed-up the analysis process by automating model build while leveraging the automation capabilities of a modern pre-processor and a seamless SPDM system. Automation of such a build process not only can shrink turnaround time but also enable democratization of simulation among non-expert users. Also, the adoption of such a process can transform how analyses are performed in large and medium-sized enterprises.



In particular, this paper will show the application of CAE process workflows distributed across the design enterprise to aid automotive vehicle analyses. As each designer checks in their respective CAD parts, CAE processes are run automatically. These include the creation of multiple mesh representations tailored to the needs of specific analyses. The use of mesh templates defined with respect to specific analysis needs provide a generic approach to meeting meshing requirements in terms of element quality and geometry feature representation. The CAE model is assembled via a CAE BOM that accesses the managed CAE data. Connections between the CAE components are created by leveraging connection data defined in the CAD model. The end result is a CAE model constructed with minimal user interaction, while assuring that the most up to date CAD data is the foundation of the CAE model.