Flow Analysis for Performance Improvement in Automotive Industry

Simulation Accelerate Development

Automotive industry includes all the industry that associated with the production, retailing, wholesaling, and maintenance of motor vehicles. It is a complex industry that involve a long industrial chain and number of assemblies which possess a great impact to both technology and economy. Nowadays, the demand of automotive industry is primarily influenced by the drive towards reducing fuel consumption and green gas emissions. Therefore, lots of the engineer nowadays is concern about on how to satisfy the requirement without compromise the performance and quality of the vehicle. In automotive industry, each of the vehicle might needed to assembly by up to few thousand of parts and a prototype is needed to be created for performance testing which will take up a lot of time if several trials are needed for each project.

Engineers do have lots of criteria to be meted such as the improvement of the geometry of vehicle as well as enhancement on engine performance. In addition, automobile manufacturer also starts to concern and take care on the comfort level of passenger. Therefore, the question to ask by the automotive industry is how can engineers work to speed up the entire process, while maintaining the quality of design at the same time.

Optimization on Passenger Comfort Level

Noise is physical disturbance that always encountered in automotive industry. It is caused by excessive vibration from the design. For instance, noise might be generated when the wind blow through the rear mirror of a car. In this case, the excessive vibration and noise might reduce the comfort level of passenger in the car. Therefore, lots of the engineers are conducting research on the noise control of the vehicle.

However, a huge cost might be needed if they want to conduct the testing in a specific equipment such as wind tunnel. In this case, external flow analysis helps to give engineer an early insight for noise generation in their model. Based on the visualization of model, engineer able to make modification to their design before building a physical prototype, which helps them to save a boom of costs.

Enhancement on Vehicle Geometry

Drag effect is one of the important factors to be considered during the designing of vehicle as it will directly impact the performance of vehicle. Therefore, an optimized shape might be proposed to reduce the effect of drag force. Several research had shown that geometry of vehicle will have the largest impact towards the fuel consumption of vehicle. Therefore, the engineer might face some difficulty when they want to relate the result from flow characteristic to structural characteristic. By implementing virtual analysis, the results from flow simulation can be used with structural simulation result, together to optimize the design. With this, the decision of the design can be based on different perspective and helps to give a better insight on the reliability of the vehicle.

Wrapping Up

In short, optimization in automotive industry is crucial as all the decision must be made based on reliable result to reduce loss of performance. SolidWorks Flow Simulation provides an integrated and friendly platform that allows the engineer to make a right decision in order to shorten the project timeline and reduce unnecessary cost.

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