32

Simulation DataManagement inActionHighlights of the NAFEMS France SPDMConference 2017Mark Norris, Consultant and Member of the NAFEMS SDM Working Group

The most recent NAFEMS SPDM Conference was held in Paris, France, inNovember 2017. This was an opportunity for French speakers to hear aboutimpressive SPDM deployments led from France and to interact with expert

practitioners. It followed on from the 2012 “Challenges of SDM” (link) conferencein Paris and could have been entitled “Achievements of SPDM”. Four industrialorganisations; Faurecia Seating Systems, Safran Landing Gear Systems, Airbusand Valeo shared their diverse experiences of SPDM solution deployments.

NAFEMS members can download the presentations from this event by visitingnafe.ms/2GKXo4b

33

Albrecht Pfaff presented PDTec’s state of the art SDMsolution and described the deployment across the VWAudi Group. However, Jean-Philippe Claeys of SchneiderElectric echoed the sentiments of Dirk Ruschmeier ofPorsche (from his keynote at the 2017 NAFEMS WoldCongress) by saying that there are still challenges thatexisting SDM solutions don’t yet address as standardfunctionality.

The conference was chaired by Gilles Besombes of ValeoThermal Systems who also emphasised the fullcapabilities needed in an ideal SPDM solution includingintelligent exploration of intellectual propertyaccumulated about the performance of the product aswell as structured exploration of design options andparameter combinations.

Christophe Lemaitre, Director of Validation and Testing,followed on from his 2012 presentation on the challengesof implementing SDM to describe five more years ofproductive use of the solution his team developed inFaurecia Seating Systems. He emphasised theimportance of a coherent approach to virtual and physicaltesting and described the overall software suite built upat Faurecia Seating to capture the completerequirements set and then develop the testing plan toensure that all requirements are met. He described thechallenges of automotive seating development especiallythe ~4000 Finite Element simulation runs required foreach new seat.

The key factor that led to the development of the SDMsystem was that Faurecia had moved to a granular FEdefinition of all the parts and components of a seatingsystem. It had proved impossible to manage the digitalthread of the versions and variants of all these FEmodels and the resulting systems’ performance withmanual data management methods. Christopheemphasised that the SDM solution was developed by FEengineers for FE engineers and saves them significanttime through data management automation. MattieuDebray, who combines the dual roles of EngineeringAnalyst and SDM solution developer, showed howparameterisation of parts enables a simulation to be re-run with a different nominal material thickness of a givenpart with just a few mouse clicks and keystrokes. Thisrepresents a considerable time saving compared tomanual methods.

Perhaps the most visually impressive development wasthe replacement of walls of whiteboards for programstatus reviews and team meetings with 50-inchtouchscreens which display program dashboards andenable deep dives into the information in the SDMsolution.

Christophe emphasised that SDM is a journey, not a bigbang transformation, and that the system has beenenhanced progressively based on discussions with theanalysts in each country. Also the importance of the

partnership of virtual and physical testing symbolised bythis Global Validation Services graphic, in which thecrash test dummy is shaking hands with his digital twin. This conference was sponsored by the magazineEssais(Testing) et Simulations so this joined-upsimulation and testing philosophy even has its ownpublication in the French language.

Vincent Raimbault presented the Safran deployment ofAnsys EKM to manage the simulation data and processesfor the certification of a Landing Gear System. His initialslides graphically illustrated the extreme and diverse setof loads that a landing gear could encounter in service.The consequence of the large number of load cases to besatisfied is that it’s necessary to manage as many as 1.5million objects and 9 million attributes for a program, alarge set of data, even by SDM standards. This SDMdeployment is an impressive achievement as it is the firstlarge scale industrial deployment of EKM presented at aNAFEMS conference. It’s also unusual in that the designof landing gear is mainly carried out using classicalstress calculations. The SDM system manages the inputdata and results relating to these classical stresscalculations, instead of the finite element analysis.

34

Once the SPDM solution had been successfully deployedto support the certification of the landing gear, it becameapparent that the Digital Thread stored in the SPDMdatabase could be reused to simulate the performance ofa specific instance of a landing gear to supportmanufacturing or service operations. It’s now possible tostand up a Digital Twin and simulate the performancebased on exact part geometry to support concessions.The Stressapps SPDM enables a manufacturingconcession analysis to be turned around in a day, backedup by comprehensive calculations. This is now possiblefor Landing Gear programs certified through SPDM sincethe solution already holds the data and simulationprocess definitions.

Safran also expect the SPDM solution to accelerate theanalyses required to certify the landing gear for higheraircraft weights as the aircraft matures. The SafranStressapps solution demonstrates the power of SPDMsolutions to support the Digital Thread for certificationand then Digital Twins throughout the product lifecycle.

Faurecia and Safran presented SDM solutions for theparticular divisions of their individual companies. Valeoand Airbus presented solutions designed to maintain thedigital thread across departments and betweencompanies. Valeo Thermal Systems presented a casestudy of the use of the KARREN simulation collaborationsolution to design an Air Intake Module, Valeo’s awardwinning solution to improve the performance ofturbocharged engines and reducing emissions. KARRENaddresses the issue of simulation collaboration betweena design engineer at the Automotive OEM and asimulation engineer at a tier 1 supplier. These engineersneed to iterate over many potential design solutionswhilst retaining the digital thread between designparameters and simulated performance.

The design engineer needs access to the CAD models inthe overall vehicle assembly whilst the simulationengineer needs access to the simulation software andcompute resources. So collaboration is traditionallydifficult with CAD data exchanges between thecompanies’ PDM systems or email exchanges which are

hard to track and don’t provide a dashboard of progress.KARREN is a novel, even revolutionary, solutiondeveloped by DPS based on shared, parameterised CADmodels of the system the supplier is proposing.

The design of an Air Intake Module is simulationintensive; the heat exchange performance is evaluatedusing CFD and many thermal/structural simulationsneed to be carried out to assess the effect of thermalshocks and to determine the fatigue life of the system.The key difference of KARREN as a collaborativeapproach is that it enables the exchange of designparameters through the user interfaces of the engineers’everyday tools, their CAD system and interactive CAEapplications. The designer requests a performanceevaluation of a set of CAD design and duty-cycleparameters and the analysts respond with theperformance results from their simulations. KARRENalso has an interface in a web browser to search forprevious simulations and display project status.

The designers and the simulation engineers areconnected through the exchange of numericalparameters with the KARREN server, metadata whichdoesn’t pose a cybersecurity risk. It’s clear that an initialconsulting phase is required to agree the parametricmodel of the system. Valeo cited the issue that one teammay specify the zero value for a valve parameter as fullyopen whereas the other may use zero to represent fullyclosed. once the parameter definitions are agreedthough, including value mapping where necessary, it’seasy for the OEM and supplier to collaborate andevaluate what-if scenarios.

In contrast to the collaboration platform approach ofKARREN, Dr Peter Schroll of Airbus presented, inidiomatic French, the operational prototype that his teamhas built and deployed internally to enable multi-disciplinary aircraft trade-off studies. This is achallenging implementation of simulation collaborationbased on system to system communication betweendifferent SPDM platforms. In this project, an aircraftarchitect is sitting on a Dassault Systems3DEXPERIENCE platform to orchestrate the overall

35

Simulation Data Management in Action

trade-off process. All the relevant information for theairframe study is routed from the DS platform toSimManager SPDM platform and thence to the airframesimulation engineers.

The prototype has been in “run-mode” since 2016 andsuccessfully applied on three Research & Technologytrade-off studies for Airbus aircraft programmes. Peterconfirmed that inter-platform collaboration, based on asubset of the MoSSEC standard, works well. In terms ofuser benefits, the architects found that there was an 80%reduction in the number of clicks to send data-sets andtrade-off requests to other departments. This both savestime and ensures a consistent, error-free digital threadbetween the architects and both other departments andexternal organisations.

Jean-Philippe Claeys of Schneider Electric gave apresentation which explained how the evolution of theirproduct technology requires evolution of their simulationtechnology which presents significant challenges toSPDM solutions. Schneider needs to integrate simulationfor six disciplines to address the functional performanceof the system and then consider the seventh discipline of

electromagnetic compatibility as control electronics arepackaged close to electrical and electromagneticsystems, whilst not forgetting thermal compatibility.Schneider need to integrate Model Based SystemsEngineering as well as Design Space Exploration andRobust Design. Schneider consider that the breadth anddepth of integrations that they require is beyond thecurrent capabilities of commercial SPDM solutions, butencourage software vendors and systems integrators todeliver more advanced SPDM solutions.

At this conference we learnt about real industrialexamples of SPDM-based Digital Threads to justifysimulation results to regulatory standards. We saw there-use of the SPDM Digital Thread built for certificationto rapidly stand up digital twins to support manufacturingconcessions. Furthermore, these real-life, productiveindustrial examples were built by the simulation and ITteams of the industrial companies concerned. The Safranproject rightly won an internal award. These industrialteams deserve our congratulations for making digitalthreads and digital twins reality amongst all themarketing hype from consultancies and softwarevendors. r

Mark Norris is a consultant who assists organisations with the implementation of PLM and SDM. He is a long-standingcontributor to the NAFEMS SDM Working Group and author of the NAFEMS SDM Business Value White Paper. He can bereached at e.mark.norris@gmail.com

Air Intake Module with water coolant flows superimposed.