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NEi Nastran customers in the automotive industry routinely address:
Full vehicle modeling, chassis, engine, driveline, body- Engine operating environment under structural and thermal loading to assess durability
- Transmission performance, including non-linear and frictional effects
- Component design
- Power train flexural and torsional dynamic response
- Noise and vibration of the Body-in-White
- Thermal cycling
- Mechanism analysis
- System and component performance and durability
- Assembly analysis of mechanical joints such as bolts, spot welds, and seam welds
- Low speed impact analysis
NEi Nastran product suite key benefits for automotive engineering:
- Comprehensive interactive tools necessary for model creation, analysis monitoring, and results evaluation including a state-of-the-art analysis editor
- Specialized industry-proven element technologies including hybrid quad and hex elements, surface and spot weld elements, and dissimilar mesh interpolation elements
- High performance processing including advanced parallel PCG iterative, sparse direct, and block Blanco solvers which allow solutions to large-scale models over 10 million degrees of freedom on inexpensive 32-bit Windows workstations as well as high end 64-bit Linux clusters
- Robust contact capability using a 3D surface contact method which easily handles dissimilar meshes between components including frictional effects
- Basic through advanced material models including temperature dependent materials, non-linear elasticity and plasticity effects, creep, and thermo-elasticity
- Model Reduction and Sub structuring allowing in-depth evaluation of particular regions and convenient transfer of models to subcontractors
- Sub modeling allowing in-depth evaluation of particular regions
- Load and Boundary Condition Interpolation allows mapping of thermal and CFD output from specialized heat transfer and fluid dynamic models to the structural model for load and boundary condition definition
- Advanced solution sequences such as linear and nonlinear static, transient dynamic, steady state dynamic, frequency extraction, heat transfer, and other analysis types, provide a choice of appropriate analysis types for different types of simulations
- Support for standard manufacturing process effects such as casting induced warpage and residual stress and strain
- Integration with specialized fatigue applications such as winLIFE, which is available as an add-on to the Ministrant product suite, and also fe-safe, nCode, Falancs and FE-Fatigue
Case Studies in Automotive Industry
Racing
Wheel by Progressive Engineering
Chassis Design by Minardi F1 Team
Conference Papers
Nonlinear Static and Multi-Axial Fatigue Analysis of Automotive Lower Control Arm Using NEi Nastran