More sophisticated simulations promise to provide more accurate modeling, potentially improving quality, efficiency and throughput.

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Simulation has played a key role in the development of automotive manufacturing, enabling engineers to digitally assess the real-world performance of manufacturing processes before actually performing those processes. But even with insightful simulations, technological limitations have often required engineers to make assumptions about actual outcomes, rather than rely heavily on simulations.

With technology advancing, many of those limitations are being overcome. Simulations are now capable of more closely linking design and manufacturing, extending simple “virtual tryouts” to more realistic “virtual performance” simulations. These more sophisticated simulations promise to provide more accurate modeling, potentially improving quality, efficiency and throughput in automotive manufacturing.

Past limitations

Historically, automotive engineers have made design assumptions about various material properties for manufactured products. Without a detailed understanding of how material properties varied during and after manufacturing, engineers would assume nominal values and apply safety factors to cover uncertainties in characteristics such as performance, fatigue and durability. This has often led to over-engineered products, with designers lacking comprehensive data on manufactured product behavior.

For example, to evaluate welding, manufacturers have performed pull tests to assess individual spot weld performance. A laboratory spot weld stressed in various ways would produce a force-displacement curve that would be fed into a simulation model. In reality, those laboratory-based predictions do not always accurately represent actual weld behavior. Similarly, laboratory tests on stamped sheet metal do not always predict real-world variations such as material thinning and strain-hardening effects.

In short, these virtual tryouts, while insightful, have lacked depth and flexibility. Isolated tests on durability, fatigue and other factors have not interacted with other tests to give comprehensive views of manufacturing processes.

New approaches

With recent advancements, virtual tryouts are being merged with virtual performance analyses and producing more detailed simulations.

Merging the virtual trial with the virtual test, and merging the manufacturing domain with the structural domain, is what’s needed to reach the next level, according to Hexagon’s Manufacturing Intelligence division. HMI develops simulation, prototyping and other technical solutions for the automotive and other industries.

Returning to the welding example, manufacturers can now replace simple pull tests with more sophisticated welding simulations. The multi-dimensional computer-aided simulations help manufacturers better understand conditions such as the impact of thermal-mechanical behavior on stress, strain, distortion and microstructure. Applications could be in spot welding of vehicle frames or interior structural components such as subframes, cross-car beams, or other welded components.

Expanding further on the example, a manufacturing process may have a strain accumulation around a certain feature that is also affected by nearby welding. The weld may change the shape of the adjacent material, inducing or reducing stresses. With more detailed simulations, results can be chained from one analysis to another to explore different interactions.

For example, the result of a forming simulation can be chained over to a welding simulation, and find that one impacts the other.

Hexagon offers a variety of manufacturing simulation solutions. Simufact Welding, for example, can be used to model and optimize thermal joining processes, accounting for welding sequence and fixture. Simufact Forming orchestrates metal forming, modeling cold forming, hot forging, rolling and stamping. Hexagon’s computer-aided engineering (CAE) software solutions enable multi-dimensional simulation of product and process performance in finite element analysis (FEA), computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and multi-body dynamics (MBD), as well as providing cost estimation and design optimization tools.

Reaping benefits

By providing more insight into manufacturing processes, simulations can provide significant benefits, such as improved quality, efficiency and throughput. Regarding quality, this could include both dimensional and performance quality. Dimensional quality considers whether all components are built to design criteria and fit together. Performance quality considers if the product functions as intended. More detailed simulations can improve quality in both areas.

Overall quality must also be balanced with schedule and cost considerations to find the ideal balance, and manufacturing process simulation can help companies get there.

Along with simulation-aided quality improvements, efficiency and throughput improvements often occur, as well. More accurate data on material properties can lead to more efficient designs. Improved designs can lead to more efficient manufacturing processes, with less rework due to uncertainties in material behavior. The various benefits go hand-in-hand with improved simulations.

Looking ahead

Recent improvements in simulation may be just scratching the surface in simulation possibilities. Artificial intelligence (AI) is impacting numerous aspects of manufacturing, and may do the same with simulation. Potential applications are numerous, but improvements are needed in training AI models to iterate autonomously and offer tangible benefits for automotive manufacturing, according to Hexagon.

Digital twins — virtual replicas of physical products or processes — also offer potential. Gaining traction in various industries, digital twins in automotive manufacturing have been primarily focused on design modeling. Future advancements could enable modeling, simulation and process monitoring data to be exchanged more freely across project lifecycles, helping product designs become easier to manufacture.

Additive manufacturing, commonly referred to as 3D printing, is also gaining prominence. As an example, significant benefits can be achieved by being able to predict what’s going to happen at the scan vector laser level and then validating that what you have is what you predicted, says Hexagon.  

As simulation continues to advance, automotive manufacturers can pursue new ways to improve processes, and moving toward the virtual performance of the as-manufactured product through manufacturing process simulation plus structural simulation equals a higher fidelity result.

Visit Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence to learn more.