The strong desire to further reduce the development time of new vehicles, while continuously improving the vehicle performance and efficiency without compromising the design robustness, requires a successive enhancement of the vehicle development process. In the last decade the full integration of CAE methods led to a significant change of the automotive engineering processes. In several functional areas like powertrain cooling and aerodynamics CAE is meanwhile seen as the primary tool to drive the vehicle development. At the same time vehicle testing is more and more focused an the final verification of the total vehicle performance. A further improvement of the value of CAE is expected from introducing CAE based optimization techniques. The ability to simultaneously take into account a large number of design parameters when developing a new optimized design makes CAE the ideal tool to drive the design of a new vehicle. This paper describes the CAE based Design of Experiment (DoE) process framework which was developed at Ford and how it was adapted to the specific needs in vehicle aerodynamics and powertrain cooling. For each of those applications a deployment example will be discussed describing the motivation of the optimization project, the CAE model parameterization, the DoE setup and the results obtained. The deployment projects show the specific value of CAE based DoE's and demonstrate how this technology can be used to drive the development of an optimized vehicle from the Thermal and Aerodynamic System Engineering (TASE) perspective. The deployment examples also illustrate how the optimization technology enables efficient trade-off discussions wherever a compromise between conflicting vehicle development requirements has to be found.
Optimization techniques in the aero/thermo development @ Ford
2013
24 Seiten, Bilder, 24 Quellen
Conference paper
English
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