automotive
The driving force in automotive
The use of modelling and simulation tools is a growing trend in automotive design.
Beth Sharp finds out why T
he humble automobile has come a long way in the past century and there can be little doubt that the engineers from that time wouldn’t envy the
tasks now facing their modern counterparts. As consumer products go, automobiles are among the most complex and technologically advanced in the world and mounting pressures, mixed with a highly competitive market, are moulding the direction of the industry. From increasing fuel efficiency to ensuring optimum drivability, manufacturers are battling for engineering supremacy, but with the added complication of the need to maintain aesthetics. Design engineers are turning to modelling and simulation technologies to aid them in this complex task and as one of the early adopters of simulation technology, the automotive industry is now making use of it throughout the entire design process. Tere are many influencing factors at work
here, but one that is particularly critical is the need for greater fuel efficiency. As a commuter, this is a particular concern of mine and like many other drivers, I always keep fuel economy figures firmly in mind when choosing a new vehicle. However, as Paul Goossens, VP for applications engineering at Maplesoſt, notes, this pressure is not solely coming from customers like me, but from governments as well. He explains that in the United States, for example, there are fairly stringent legal requirements based around corporate average fuel efficiency (CAFE) constraints. Tese efficiencies have to be delivered
across manufacturers’ entire range of vehicles and that’s driving a huge amount of research. ‘Manufacturers are implementing a wide range of different strategies in order to fulfil requirements,’ he says. ‘Design engineers approach this in many ways, from finding means of increasing the efficiency of existing
www.scientific-computing.com Morgan Motor Company’s new 3 Wheeler has been entirely designed using Autodesk’s Alias software
systems, such as an engine or transmission, right through to proposing fairly radical new designs for the extended range electric vehicles that are starting to come to the fore.’ Words like ‘electric’ and ‘sustainability’
are indeed buzzing throughout the industry and Sandeep Sovani, automotive expert at Ansys, agrees that not only are manufacturers steadily increasing their investments in sustainable technologies, but that a huge amount of attention is being devoted to vehicle electrification. He explains that electric powertrains are being developed and believes that as automotive engineers work on batteries and fraction motors they are being faced with a completely new set of challenges. ‘It has been a century since the first
automobiles were introduced and it has taken us that long to perfect the internal combustion engine-based powertrain that exists in today’s vehicles,’ Sovani comments. ‘Markets and governments around the world are now expecting to have a new electric powertrain in just a matter of 10 years and that is a massive engineering challenge.’
Electrickery A modern automobiles’ complexity extends to the proliferation of electronics contained within. According to Integrated Engineering Soſtware’s Bruce Klimpke, where previously electronics
constituted a small part of the automotive market, 20 cents on every dollar that’s spent on an automobile now goes into an electrical part, in one way or another. He explains that modern cars that park automatically, for example, require many electrical and magnetic systems working in unison and that each component must be compatible with the others. ‘System integration has become
increasingly vital and each team needs a way of communicating and sharing information,’ he says. ‘For example, the person designing the back door has to share information with whomever is developing the system for the automatic parking. When placing the sensors, there may be a choice of installing them at the top, centre or edges of the door. Te question then becomes how many sensors are needed as the more that are included, the higher the cost.’ Tis exponential increase in functionality
has led to a standardisation movement within the industry, dubbed AUTOSAR (AUTomotive Open System ARchitecture), that aims to establish open standards for automotive Electric/Electronics (E/E) architecture. Guido Sandmann, automotive marketing manager, EMEA, MathWorks, explains: ‘Automotive engineers using model-based design (MBD) in order to develop applications and soſtware want the ability to reuse that soſtware with only minor adjustments for different variants and
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