Forgot your
pencil? Nowadays, if you work in manufacturing, that’s probably not as much of
a problem as it used to be. Gone are the days of blueprints, rulers and
pencil-sharpeners. Make way for simulation.
Of course,
simulation in itself isn’t new; companies have been using it for some time now.
But in the era of the Internet of Things (IoT) and next-generation autonomous
and connected vehicles, simulation software is becoming ever more important.
When there are a lot of driverless cars, not the few here and there we have
today, how will they behave on our roads? How will they affect traffic jams,
and do we need to change our infrastructure and upgrade our street furniture
for a seamless transition to an autonomous future? Simulation is key to
predicting what will happen – and it’s equally crucial to actually making these
next-generation vehicles.
“With the
urgency created by the market needs, and the accessibility to high-power
technology and data, simulation is no longer thought of as a third wheel in
product development, but rather poised to drive design decision making, and
hence force a paradigm shift in the evolution of designs themselves,” says
Vikram Vedantham, senior business development manager for simulation at
Autodesk.
Designs have
evolved in complexity at a tremendous rate, he adds, and “the need for customisation
implies that each design can behave very differently from a variant”. There is
a rapid adoption of new-age materials such as composites, and the rapid growth
of plastics and additive manufacturing – which change the way designs are built
and studied to understand manufacturability and performance.
“Prior art,
tribal knowledge and experience are certainly great guiding pillars in decision
making, but design complexity and the need for innovative designs establish
simulation as a critical toolset for detailed design insights throughout the
product development cycle,” says Vedantham.
A step ahead
Fabien
Letailleur, manager of the SIMULIA industry solutions brand at Dassault
Systemes, agrees. “Only simulation can create a virtual equivalent of a product
performing in a given setting, and inform engineers effectively so that they
are able to adapt the designs that they are responsible for,” he says.
Simulations are
extremely useful to map many processes in manufacturing autonomous vehicles;
take control units, which have to be larger than in non-autonomous vehicles,
for cooling, structural integrity, and so on, says Letailleur. It’s also
possible to use simulations to evaluate driver interactions with Advanced
Driver Assistance Systems, driver comfort based on the behaviour of autonomous
vehicles, and for radar systems, he adds.
Thanks to
simulation software, it’s now possible to predict how an industrial component
is going to operate and respond to the environment – well before the product
gets to market. Not only will this improve the design and drive down
maintenance costs, but it will also streamline operations, said Chris
MacDonald, a senior director at PTC, at a recent conference held by ANSYS in
Tokyo. “Dynamic system models with connected insight, sensors, multi-physics,
data from virtual sensors… together that creates not just a digital representation
but enriched complex analysis,” he said.
Simulation
allows for the so-called Digital Twins to come to life – a product that is the
exact copy of the real thing, but in a virtual world. “Our ability to be
proactive when we service that product becomes a lot more powerful when we can
expose our simulation, bring our smart connected world together, and build both
deductive and inductive learning models. Digital Twin is a game changer for the
industry.”
Getting real
Another game
changer is realtime simulation. “Having access to real-world data in real time
opens up new ways to provide value-added services to end users,” says
Letailleur. “For example, when a car travels over a pothole, sensors measure
the force transmitted to the chassis and body and send that data to the cloud.
Simulations can then be performed using the force data on a digital version of
the vehicle to evaluate potential damage to the chassis or body.” The driver
can then be alerted about the severity of the damage and the maintenance or
repair procedures needed to fix it.
“This new
business model allows the OEM to provide additional services to customers by
combining real-world force data with simulation,” he adds.
At PTC, the Creo
Product Insight software is “the missing connection that enables IoT data to
connect to CAD and consequently simulation,” says Paul Sagar, the firm’s
vice-president of product management. “Real-world data is invaluable in the
design process as it enables us to fully understand how a product is being used
and how it is performing, and enables engineers to replace their design
assumptions with actual factual data. This eliminates the risk of a design
being over- or under-engineered, reducing the development costs.”
And saving costs
is crucial in manufacturing – as well as saving time. Lucid Air, for example, a
new luxury-class electric vehicle from Lucid Motors, was built in just three
years thanks to simulation, said Alberto Bassanese, the company’s manager of
multi-physics and optimisation, at the conference in Tokyo.
Even though
Lucid Motors still visits the wind tunnel periodically, most development
happens through simulation, he said. “It’s all about reducing the impact
outside of the car, a conflicting situation you can only access through
simulation.”
Freedom to
experiment
It goes beyond
that, of course. Simulation helps to derive insights early and often through
product development, to guide design decision making, says Vedantham. “If used
to determine durability and longevity of the product, simulation has already
been shown to reduce engineering change orders and reduce warranty issues.
Simulation also allows users to experiment with alternative materials and
design variants and hence impact the ‘green initiatives’ within organisations.”
Sagar of PTC
agrees. “Simulations save companies money in multiple ways. The obvious one is
reducing the number of expensive physical prototypes needed, but also there is
the fact that more options can be evaluated, ensuring that a better design is
achieved.
“This inevitably
helps to reduce the Cost of Poor Quality by ensuring that the designs are
engineered correctly the first time and reducing product recalls. Adding Creo
Product Insight also then ensures that the engineering requirements and
specifications are based on actual versus assumed data.”
And what about
safety? Simulation has long been applied to various crash situations – and, in
the context of autonomous vehicles, “companies can use simulation to validate
the programming of the car before having to put physical prototypes on the
road; they can evaluate many more challenging situations in a shorter amount of
time than in real life,” says Letailleur.
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