Exa® Corporation announces its newest release, PowerFLOW 5.1, offering up to a 300% speed up for complex transient cabin comfort simulations — allowing vehicle manufacturers an accurate, robust, and practical method of studying exceedingly complex thermal engineering problems.
According to J.D. Power and Associates' initial quality studies, it is crucial for automobile manufacturers to design and produce reliable climate control systems, as they are paramount to the interior comfort of today's vehicle owners. "Consumers demand to be comfortable in their vehicles," said Ales Alajbegovic, Exa's Vice President, Ground Transportation Applications. "Beyond ensuring customer satisfaction, optimizing and engineering passenger vehicle cabins and HVAC systems though simulation can save fuel and reduce emissions."
The current thermal engineering design process presents many challenges for the engineering team. They often must wait for full cabin designs and prototypes to be available for evaluation. Additionally, engineers have had to rely on mannequins and thermal measurement devices that assess temperatures, but do not provide useful feedback as to the source of the thermal inefficiency. Exa's simulations are performed early in the design process and combine accurate feedback on thermal performance with actionable insights on the source of the problem to enable engineering teams to create a better product without compromise.
As described in a paper presented by Honda R&D Co. Ltd., ThermoAnalytics and Exa, thermal engineering of a vehicle's cabin is incredibly complex and requires long simulations to properly predict the thermal behavior of hours of physical time. "Through Exa's PowerFLOW 5.1 release, engineers can expect up to a three hundred percent solver speed-up for their cabin comfort simulations — a remarkable time savings," said Dr. Jaehoon Han, Director for Thermal Management Applications. "Achieving faster cabin comfort simulations through this state-of-the-art technology allows manufacturers to realistically include thermal evaluations in the early stages of product development. When combined with our equally powerful solutions for acoustic noise evaluation, engineers now have a complete solution for cabin comfort. With Exa they can design comfortable, quieter cabins through simulation and avoid expensive, late-stage design changes."
PowerFLOW 5.1 is a comprehensive new release that includes many new applications features to offer engineers consistently accurate simulations with faster turnaround times. Updates to acoustics absorption material, battery modeling, rotating geometry simulation as well as a simplified passenger comfort case setup are all part of the PowerFLOW 5.1 release.
