Fraunhofer Institute for Chemical Technology ICTDue to the high complexity of the processes involved, it is often very expensive to develop and manufacture individual drive system components or entire drive systems. The NAS simulation team consequently works on the modeling and analysis of these components and systems, in order to identify potential strengths and weaknesses in the early stages of the development process. This enables the verification of new designs, minimal testing efforts and rapid development from the initial idea to the finished component with as few corrections as possible.
Simulation
System simulation
In order to assess the behavior of individual components in the system, NAS uses simulation tools for the transfer of heat, material and information, for example "Dymola" or "GT-Suite". The components are modeled physically or on the basis of a map.
Vehicle simulation
The tool "IPG-CarMaker" can conduct a simulation for the entire vehicle. Vehicles can be split into different modular components, and their efficiency can be assessed during driving. This enables the reduced energy consumption of the technologies to be calculated in driving cycles.
Flow simulation
Drive systems include numerous flow processes with a wide variety of characteristics and physical complexities, for example gas mixture flows during charge conversion in the combustion engine or fluid flows such as those in cooling circuits. For the detailed analysis of these flows, professional CFD tools such as "Ansys Fluent" and "StarCCM+" are used.
Structural simulation
A clear transition towards lightweight design can be seen in the research and industrial sectors. Materials must be light, mechanically solid and temperature-resistant. The research team for simulation contributes to this transition by providing structural analyses, enabling the verification and optimization of components. "Ansys Mechanical" is used for these simulation tasks.
Multi-body simulation
In order to visualize the influence of dynamic effects on the component behavior, multi-body simulations are conducted using the simulation program "Simpack".