New CO₂ targets require innovative solutions to achieve safety and comfort at low emission rates. This poses new engineering challenges such as detecting and resolving potential hazards. For conventional cars, water is a hazard as it can hinder an engine’s combustion process by impeding airflow. For electric cars, safety is impacted by pressure forces exceeded on the underbody, endangering battery packs of an electric car when driving through deep water.
With PreonLab, you can simulate wading through arbitrary depths of water in a controlled virtual environment. You don’t need to have the physical prototype and a wading channel. You don’t need to mount dozens of cameras to get minimal information. You don’t need to rely on a complicated and sensitive sensor setup for measurements. PreonLab accounts for all parts of the car; even the suspension. You can gain loads of insight by doing a full wetting analysis, measuring the flooding height, predicting underbody forces, measuring flow rates and understanding the flow path. PreonLab gives you the tools to quickly learn how your designs perform in whatever metric you’re interested in.
Starting from 5.2, there is a new object available for wading applications, called the Vehicle Simulation Model (VSM). This tool offers the possibility to co-simulate PreonLab with AVL VSM (vehicle dynamics simulation software).
This enables you to co-simulate the vehicle’s interaction with fluids and the track. It models each wheel suspension accurately and has a virtual driver that controls the vehicle’s motion.
The video renderings here show the first few results of VSM in combination with the Continuous Particle Size refinement. Get in touch with us, if you would like to setup a scene on your own!
For Volvo Cars, Johann Idoffsson had worked on an evaluation of PreonLab for the simulation of water wading scenarios. The comparison has been made not only between PreonLab and the previous toolchain based on a grid-based CFD method but also between the virtual water wading results from PreonLab with the real-world test bed.
Even though only having the limited time of a Master Thesis, the ease-of-use of PreonLab enabled them to set up a sophisticated model even including a model of the car suspension in many different variants taking a GPS velocity profile as a boundary condition.
In wading simulations, the precise modelling of the car movement becomes increasingly important the faster the car moves or with increasing water level in the wading channel. The position, orientation and velocity of the car when hitting the water pool determine the wave pattern in front of the car and whether or not water flows across the engine hood or not. Considering the latter, the profiles of springs and dampers play an important role. In PreonLab you can easily define a model for the car suspension and get higher accuracy and reliability.