Current CAE Trends in the Automotive Industry

Abstract

This paper provides a compact review of the current Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) trends in the automotive industry from the perspective of Volkswagen Group research. CAE has established itself as an integral part of the vehicle engineering design process. Moreover, it provides the foundation for success in a very competitive market. In order to reduce costs and time to market, the number of physical prototypes needs to be reduced. This can only be accomplished through the systematic advancement of virtual methodologies that support the brands to evolve towards a 100% simulation-based prototype-free product development environment. Several relevant areas of vehicle development are considered. Starting with the issue of safety, the topics of finite-element human body modelling for occupant and pedestrian safety evaluation as well as structural vehicle crash simulations are discussed. Other topics such as the usage of computational fluid dynamics methods in the areas of vehicle aerodynamics and aeroacoustics are also considered. Finally, new areas of methods development are briefly discussed by showing novel applications of reduced order modelling and artificial intelligence methods including Big Data analysis. These methodologies will provide the basis for greatly accelerating solver speed and ensure the extraction of more information from simulation results.