This presentation was made at the NAFEMS Eastern European Seminar "Engineering Analysis & Simulation in the Automotive Industry" held on the 7th of November in Bucharest.

Automotive manufacturers and suppliers are constantly challenged with delivering innovative, safe, and dependable vehicles to market as efficiently as possible. As a result, engineering teams must discover, evaluate, and successfully implement leading-edge technology and methods to produce a reliable, effective outcome. Many of these efforts now come together under concepts such as Industry 4.0, Digital Twin, CAE Democratization, and Cloud Solutions. But what do these really mean for you, as a simulation specialist?

Resource Abstract

In CAE simulations, on complicated structures that consist of numerous sub-assemblies, CAE teams handle the model by decomposing it to several “include files”. This methodology, supported by all major FEA solvers, allows the break-down of a complete CAE model to individual standalone units represented by different solver keyword files, which are re-united to form the full model during the simulation by the solvers. This methodology offers a big advantage mainly in the CAE model improvement process, i.e. the looping phase. During this phase, several individual analysts are involved, studying different area of the model each, and finally change and update only the relative include files.



It is undoubtedly a fact that this distributed working model during the looping phase is very efficient. However, daily work is based on the assumption that the local modifications introduced by each analyst are such that they do not interfere with the rest of the model and they do not put the overall model integrity at risk. Although the validation of the complete CAE model at each iteration would practically eliminate integration errors, it is not applicable due to the considerable overhead that would be incurred by the reading of the complete model in the pre-processor and the execution of a series of checks.



Data traceability is another issue that relates to the modular organization of simulation runs. During the looping phase the local modifications introduced by each analyst are usually stored and managed separately by saving the relative include files locally. This practice often results in CAE teams losing track of the modifications made, the respective stored files and the person involved. Utilizing the latest and up-to-date include files for the analyses to follow, is usually proven to be a hard and time consuming task.



A new Simulation Environment for modular simulation run management has been developed by BETA, to facilitate the creation and management of modular models, through subsystem preparation, model assembly, loadcase set-up, looping phase and results review and comparison. The main enablers of this new Environment are:



• The Model Browser: A workspace in ANSA for the creation and management of the modular simulation run in a bottom-up approach

• The Data Manager: The SDM backbone, that is used for the storage of all simulation data, from part meshes to subsystems, library items, simulation main files and their key-results and reports, with the right metadata and keeping track of all data relationships

• The Build Processes: The methodologies associated to the preparation and validation of each module of the simulation run and of the simulation run as a whole.

This paper introduces this new, collaborative Simulation environment that takes advantage of the flexibility and efficiency offered by the modular model organization methodology, eliminating the shortcomings of current practices with respect to model quality assurance and traceability, finally making the whole CAE simulation process more efficient, transparent and traceable.