Common Mesh Approach for Automotive Vehicle CAE Analysis 2017-01-0375

Over the past decades, Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) based assessment of vehicle durability, NVH (Noise, Vibration and Harshness) and crash performance has become very essential in vehicle development and verification process. CAE activity is often organized as different groups based on the specific attributes (durability, NVH and crash). Main reasons for this are the expertise required and the difference in the finite element software technologies (explicit vs implicit) used to perform and interpret various CAE analyses in each of the attributes. This leads to individual attribute team creating its own model of the vehicle and there is not much exchange of the CAE models between the attribute teams. Different model requirements for each attribute make model sharing challenging. However, CAE analyses for all attributes start with common CAD and follow the same sub-process in vehicle development cycle. This provides an opportunity to save resources if all attributes could use the same mesh in their respective model. Further process efficiency improvement can be achieved by eliminating the need to reconcile each attribute mesh to the common design level for multi-disciplinary design optimization (MDO).