The Transportation & Mobility industry is evolving rapidly to meet new requirements over the coming years. Certainly most visible in this evolution is the Automotive sector, where more stringent fuel economy/emissions and safety regulations, along with growing consumer expectations, are but a few of the challenges to be met. Advanced modeling and simulation will play an increasingly important role, and the recent SIMULIA Community Conference showcased several situations where that is clearly being accomplished today. Here are a few examples: 

• Sung-Ling Twu of General Motors presented a paper which highlighted the usage of Abaqus and ATOM to optimize flexible multilink suspension systems, where the front and rear suspensions for the all-new 2013 Cadillac ATS were shown for demonstration. Accounting for various nonlinearities is critical to arrive at a properly optimized design, especially as suspensions today become more complex to meet demanding performance requirements. He also pointed out that design synthesis carried out with system modeling techniques can provide more reasonable design suggestions than component level design optimization, because the system model can better describe how components interact with each other in a compliant mechanism. Download paper. 

• Kim Yeow of AVL Engineering gave a presentation on work done in Abaqus to model the electro-thermal behavior of lithium-ion batteries, commonly used in Hybrid Electrical Vehicles (HEV), Plug-in Hybrid Electrical Vehicles (PHEV), and Electrical Vehicles (EV). Flow of electrical current within the battery structure causes it to heat up, and battery life and performance can be adversely affected by temperatures that are too high. So a key factor is to design batteries that experience operating temperatures within a desired range. Different battery geometries and cooling strategies were investigated, with simulation results comparing well against measured temperature data. Download paper. 

• Jordi Viñas of IDIADA Automotive Technology presented a paper on road restraint systems (RRS) which demonstrated a combination of Abaqus simulation capabilities not normally used together – crash simulation, geomechanics soil models, bolt loading and others. A new European regulation is being implemented to qualify RRS in terms of quality and performance, and the paper documents a methodology developed at IDIADA to employ simulation effectively in a virtual development process for RRS. Download paper.

For other papers presented at the conference visit the SIMULIA resource center.