In today’s rapidly evolving automotive landscape, the demand for software that can precisely and efficiently simulate and analyze thermal conditions in vehicles is greater than ever. Siemens, a leader in cutting-edge digital solutions, has addressed this need with STAR-CCM+. This advanced software offers a suite of applications and technologies designed to provide unparalleled accuracy and insight into vehicle heat protection. To fully appreciate how STAR-CCM+ can transform your projects, it’s essential to first understand the underlying reasons driving its capabilities.
Why is Vehicle Heat Protection Important Today?
Full vehicle thermal simulation optimizes the heat protection and energy management for higher efficiency in a vehicle and ensures that emissions and fuel economy targets are met, thus guaranteeing that increasingly stringent regulations in the design process are satisfied.
Vehicle heat protection is needed for the increasing complexity in modern day designs. When implemented, these technologies and strategies help maintain optimal thermal environments for batteries in HEV/EV’s, while managing thermal performance of electrical and electronic systems. Thermal management is still also very critical in the latest internal combustion engines (ICE) vehicles where the limits are being pushed for efficiency.
On top of all of this, vehicle heat protection assists in the lowering of overall costs in a project by eliminating physical testing and identifying design failures early on that help shorten the design cycles.
How Can Vehicle Thermal Simulation and Analysis Address Challenges?
Vehicle thermal simulation helps engineers to predict and understand real-world behavior of their designs. Through the simulation of a vehicle’s full thermal performance, they can gain a deeper understanding of energy flow and management in their designs and assess performance over the full range of expected conditions. Simulation also allows them to explore many design variants, thus reducing the design cycle and optimizing the designs of drive components to deliver a thermally balanced vehicle.
Key Requirements of Vehicle Heat Protection Simulation in STAR-CCM+
- Complex Geometric Handling
- STAR-CCM+ offers bi-directional connectivity to native CAD packages, allowing users to both modify and create geometries seamlessly. It includes a built-in parametric feature-based modeler (3D-CAD) and serves as a fully integrated CAD tool for geometry construction. Users can import external CAD models for modification and handle various formats of surface data, including surface meshes, neutral format data, and native CAD data. Additionally, it provides powerful tools for surface and CAD repair, enhancing flexibility and precision in the design process.
- Seamless Meshing
- The trimmed cell mesh in STAR-CCM+ generates flow-aligned meshes for virtual tunnel flows, while the polyhedral mesh captures the geometric complexity of solids and internal fluids. The robust prism layer mesh resolves turbulent boundary layers accurately, and the specialized thin mesher handles thin solids in heat transfer calculations. STAR-CCM+’s conformal interfaces between fluid and solid regions ensure precise data mapping in conjugate heat transfer scenarios.
- Multiphysics
- STAR-CCM+ provides integrated multi-physics with seamless coupling between fluid and solid domains for modeling flow and heat transfer. It supports both steady and unsteady flow simulations, and handles conduction, convection, and radiation. The software also manages various motion scenarios, including sliding meshes and fan interfaces, and features models for single and dual stream heat exchangers.
- Parallel Computation and Scalability
- STAR-CCM+ leverages parallel computation and scalability to ensure continuous performance improvement, driven by its rapid development pace. Benchmarking has shown that the software delivers high performance even for complex virtual tunnel models (VTM), demonstrating its capability to handle intricate simulations efficiently
- Intelligent Design Exploration
- STAR-CCM+ facilitates intelligent design exploration by allowing users to easily automate design changes and component swaps to investigate thousands of scenarios. Its integrated GUI streamlines the process of viewing, analyzing, and comparing multiple designs. The software’s intelligent design space exploration capabilities automatically identify optimized designs, supporting both single and multi-objective optimization—such as minimizing drag while maximizing heat rejection.
- Data Management
- STAR-CCM+ offers seamless data management with end-to-end information flow and full traceability. It features a simple, robust, and fast communication channel with the Teamcenter database, integrating all aspects of CAE simulation analysis. This connection ensures the import of accurate and up-to-date geometry, material definitions, and simulation parameters. Users can access detailed part and surface attributes defined in Teamcenter, allowing comprehensive product definition, simulation, and analysis data to be centralized and accessible across the enterprise in a single location.
Overview
Siemens STAR-CCM+ stands out as the premier software for vehicle thermal simulation due to its comprehensive capabilities and efficiency. It excels at generating meshes from complex full-vehicle geometries and simulating heat transfer in a unified environment, incorporating all relevant physics. The software offers a range of methods to balance compute time and accuracy, delivering exceptional performance on HPC resources. Its powerful design exploration and optimization tools utilize automated workflows, and integrated data management enables full automation of simulations. This streamlined approach allows for rapid vehicle heat protection assessments and sign-offs within incredibly quick turn-around, making STAR-CCM+ an invaluable tool for advanced thermal management in automotive applications.
Learn more about Vehicle Heat Protection using STAR-CCM+ in the presentation below: