FE-DESIGN

Process Automation for Multidisciplinary Optimization

Customer request

The development of a car body is a very complex process, as various functional requirements have to be considered. Different targets with sometimes competitive issues define a challenge for the development engineers. Today, numerical simulation is a well established and widespread tool to predict, analyse and optimize the functional characteristics of a car. The engineer describes a design and the simulation will predict the performance of this design. Very often, numerical optimization is performed considering only one single simulation discipline. Once an optimal design has been found it has to be verified for all other relevant disciplines. In most cases this process leads to significant design changes. Therefore, it requires a great effort of all participating engineers to find an optimum design that satisfies all relevant disciplines. This process is very time consuming and often ends up in an unsatisfying design compromise.
In this example, the target is to optimize the body in white of a car structure under consideration of crash, nvh and durability loadcases.

Our solution: Process automation

All experts have to coordinate the disciplines and set up a common parameterisation for the participating simulation disciplines (crash, nvh, durability). The detailed worflows per discipline are compiled and tested. Next the complete multidisciplinary workflow is assembled that can also be executed in a cluster system.

Benefit for the Customer

The capturing of the simulation steps and the combination of the single analysis disciplines allows a full automation of the workflow. This fully automated process can now be used to quickly evaluate design variants and to execute complete optimization under consideration of all system responses over the different disciplines.

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