Process Improvement “I think we are getting more and more to a point,” he
added, “where we work with a customer where the design is not frozen yet. We are working with them at a point where no hardware has been made.” Tis collaboration is driven both from the Dana side and the customer side of the process. And both sides have profited as vehicle sales rebounded. Dana Holding—a US-based, Tier One global supplier of
axles, driveshaſts, sealing and thermal-management products, off-highway transmissions, and service parts—has seen a turn- around in revenues and margins since the economic down- turn. While its customers’ recovery was a major contributor, credit for Dana’s rebound also goes to an evolution in mindset that helped keep the company on track through tough times. “We had shiſted focus,” said Popielas, “from how to control
costs and manufacture efficiently, to how to innovate. Obvi- ously all these need to be integrated. But if you focus solely on costs, product quality will go down. As an engineering-driven company, we look at how to improve a product from a quality and function perspective. Innovation, supported by the right engineering tools, made our company more competitive.”
Keeping the Team Together Many auto suppliers lost engineering talent during the re-
cession. However, since Dana had already developed substan- tial in-house CAE and high-performance computing (HPC) resources, the company made a point of retaining their design engineering teams. “During the downturn, we kept our focus on CAE,” said Popielas. “We knew that, in the long run, the investment would be worth it.” Indeed, CAE has proved invaluable to the company. Dana’s
products include a vast range of gaskets, cam covers, and heat exchangers; mechanical and electrical components; driveline components and assemblies and more. Dana works in materi- als ranging from metals to rubber to plastics to fiber-based. Its production processes include casting, injection molding, heat treatment, forming, magnetic pulse welding, etc. “Because we make pretty much everything around the
automotive powertrain and drivetrain, our portfolio involves huge complexity,” said Popielas. “To ensure quality when designing our products, we need to look at everything that can impact them, including stress, strain, fatigue, molding, gas, oil and cooling flow, air and oil separation, thermal distribution and, of course, their complex interactions. CAE is the toolkit that supports the development of our products in the engi- neering space. Simulation enables us to verify and validate— virtually—product functionality.” While real-world testing remains the ultimate proof of
that functionality, Dana’s extensive use of CAE has enabled the company to do less and less physical testing. “Simulation speeds up the product development process, captures data that can be used to optimize the product and gives our engineers more freedom to innovate,” said Popielas. “Innovation is criti-
60 Motorized Vehicle Manufacturing
cal for us, but it still has to be cost-effective. Our CAE resourc- es help minimize, or even neutralize, many time-consuming tasks of the past, such as creating drawings, prototyping, and going through extensive physical testing for each design itera- tion. CAE takes out costs across the board.” Dana’s CAE arsenal is extensive. Among the tools are
Abaqus from Simulia, Dassault Systèmes, the company’s longtime FEA solver for realistic simulation; Hypermesh from Altair, Abaqus/CAE and Simlab for preprocessing; StarCCM+ from CD-adapco and FlowVision from Capvidia for compu- tational fluid dynamics; MoldFlow for molding simulation; and FESafe for fatigue. Isight, also from Simulia, is used for optimization tasks such as Design of Experiments. While continuing individual component analysis, Dana
has also made the step into simulating subsystems, complete systems, and global models. “As the company transitions to full systems engineering in the virtual world, we expect to add even more soſtware codes in the future,” said Popielas.
Full Systems Engineering in the Virtual World As the simulation process at Dana matured, the challenge
for the engineering group shiſted from how to accurately pre- dict real product performance, to other pressing issues: How to more effectively connect simulation with the rest of the business and decision-making processes. How to improve col- laboration with both the customer and among Dana’s global engineering resources. How to improve the management of the growing volume of data generated by the simulation pro- cess, the approaches and the IP created by the CAE analysts. To address these needs Dana turned to Dassault Systèmes
and the Simulia Simulation Lifecycle Management (SLM) solution. Dana engaged in an in-depth evaluation of SLM to measure capability to their specific needs, and began deploying Simulia’s SLM in the summer of 2012. Based on Dassault Sys- tèmes’ V6 platform technology, SLM enables a company to de- fine and manage simulation methods, models and procedures (scenarios). “When you get into virtual engineering, in order to not waste your investment you have to have a tool in place that manages data, process and development,” said Popielas. Historically, CAE at Dana was the purview of individual ex-
perts who would select from among multiple soſtware tools to perform everything from design data preparation to simulation execution to results analysis, storing both inputs and solutions mostly on their local hard drives. Tis made collaboration difficult, and coordinating larger projects a major challenge. Communication about design changes was also an issue, with the experts sometimes running simulations on outdated data files. Te situation was further complicated by Dana’s growth strategy of dispersing teams globally in order to keep closer contact with their geographically diverse customers. “An individual product validation can involve thousands of gigabytes of information over time,” said Popielas. “When you
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133 |
Page 134 |
Page 135 |
Page 136 |
Page 137 |
Page 138 |
Page 139 |
Page 140 |
Page 141 |
Page 142 |
Page 143 |
Page 144 |
Page 145 |
Page 146 |
Page 147 |
Page 148 |
Page 149 |
Page 150 |
Page 151 |
Page 152 |
Page 153 |
Page 154 |
Page 155 |
Page 156 |
Page 157 |
Page 158 |
Page 159 |
Page 160 |
Page 161 |
Page 162 |
Page 163 |
Page 164 |
Page 165 |
Page 166 |
Page 167 |
Page 168 |
Page 169 |
Page 170 |
Page 171 |
Page 172 |
Page 173 |
Page 174 |
Page 175 |
Page 176 |
Page 177 |
Page 178 |
Page 179 |
Page 180 |
Page 181 |
Page 182 |
Page 183 |
Page 184 |
Page 185 |
Page 186 |
Page 187 |
Page 188 |
Page 189 |
Page 190 |
Page 191 |
Page 192 |
Page 193 |
Page 194 |
Page 195 |
Page 196 |
Page 197 |
Page 198 |
Page 199 |
Page 200 |
Page 201 |
Page 202 |
Page 203 |
Page 204 |
Page 205 |
Page 206 |
Page 207 |
Page 208 |
Page 209 |
Page 210 |
Page 211 |
Page 212