PREH Romania uses ANSYS for simulations in automotive industry
Preh's development and manufacturing capabilities include, in particular, HMI systems for passenger cars and commercial vehicles, infotainment, and connectivity solutions, as well as e-mobility control units, which include: booster units (800V), DC/DC converters (400V/48V/12V), On-Board Chargers (OBC) and Battery Management Systems (BMS).
1. OBIECTIVES
Steel sheetmetal covers are a good solution due to their light yet very strong configuration and good corrosion protection. But is a challenge to create a good design from the first time that will fulfill all the requirements.
The objective of this study is to find the proper design for maximizing rigidity of sheetmetal products to fit specific requirements. The test requirements here are pressure and vacuum.
Here is shown how FEA Analysis helps in finding the best design.
2. WORKING PATH
The setup is simple as our assembly consists of the sheetmetal cover and a housing counterpart. The chosen material is a simple bilinear hardening model of a steel.
Here we are analyzing the behavior of the cover during pressure and vacuum (deflection and stress) and also we are looking at the results after the loading is removed (permanent deflection and plastic strain amount).
3. SOLUTION
The results are compared and from all of the versions we can chose the better.
4. CUSTOMER BENEFIT
It is obvious that the advantage of using simulation right after the design process helps in finding a very good design, when we’re speaking about optimization.
The time spent, in this study and not only, is one of the most valuable things when it’s coming to benefits. Whereas this study took us a couple of days of working, the time for production and testing of 10 sheetmetal covers could be measured in weeks or even months. Sometimes the production cost for some parts can be higher than the ANSYS license cost for 1 year.
This being just an example, we are anyway using it for many more types of simulations, like thermal, thermo-mechanical, dynamic, sine vibration, random vibration and electromagnetics.