Our Challenge
Help overcome technical hurdles and accelerate the development of fuel-efficient automotive technologies.
Our Approach
The Digital Functional Vehicle (DFV) project, in work with NREL's Scientific Computing Center, uses integrated Computer-Aided Engineering (CAE) tools to help address these challenges.
Within NREL's Center for Transportation Technologies and Systems (CTTS), the DFV project works with automotive partners on real-world geometries that often require complex finite-element models. One application required developing parametric finite-element models to analyze coolant flow and optimize heat-transfer rates based on fin sizing, configuration, and geometry. The detailed finite-element models included 500,000 to 1 million elements. Solutions to this problem required large amounts of memory, disk space, and high processing speeds, which were provided by the Scientific Computing Center evaluation system.
CTTS is also looking to the Scientific Computing Center for expanded computing power for additional modeling applications: Computational fluid dynamics modeling of vehicle cabin interiors, and the development of a human physiological model to be integrated into the vehicle cabin.
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(Credit: Kenneth Kelly and Andreas Vlahinos, NREL) |
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