Reducing testing time in harsh environments by up to 12 percent with faster setup

Beyond performance

Building the best vehicles is about more than just performance. To be competitive in the global market, cars must be built to withstand strong shocks and vibrations as well as a wide range of temperatures to ensure durability and passenger safety and comfort. Customers expect cars to last for years before they break down, but development teams can’t test vehicles for years to determine durability. To effectively test this, Hyundai Motor Company (Hyundai) needs to determine loading conditions on vehicle subsystems over their lifecycle. This requires a rugged data acquisition system that can also cope with all these conditions as well as being easy to fit into the vehicle and attach all the required sensors.

To accomplish that goal, Hyundai chose Simcenter™ hardware and software, which are part of the Siemens Xcelerator business platform of software, hardware and services.

Testing subsystem and full vehicle durability

The goal of the durability technology team at Hyundai is to create test bench schedules that accurately measure the durability of vehicle subsystems. These test schedules are created based on vibration signals measured during road load data acquisition (RLDA) campaigns on their proving grounds. The output of these bench tests is then further processed and analyzed to predict the durability lifecycle of the individual subsystems, like electric vehicle (EV) battery systems.

Jongwoo Kim, technology part manager, explains there are multiple reasons for carrying out these RLDA campaigns: “In addition to measuring accelerations to replicate these on our test bench, we measure wheel forces, chassis part transfer forces and body deformation to enable full vehicle testing,” he says. “This load data also serves as input for simulation during future development to further optimize the design of each subsystem and the entire vehicle.”

Typically, Kim’s team measures 15 to 20 acceleration channels, but this can easily rise to as many as 100 channels when performing full-vehicle testing. In that case, they need to add a variety of types of sensors to their test setup such as strain gauges, accelerometers, displacement sensors, load cells and wheel force transducers.

“Each test takes around two to three weeks,” says Kim. “It’s a significant amount of time, so we must ensure the results are accurate and that testing doesn’t take any longer than necessary, especially when the tests are executed in extreme environmental conditions, which is often the case for durability tests. We need the best tools that allow our engineers to work conveniently and easily.”

Acquiring real-world test data under harsh conditions

These requirements made Simcenter SCADAS™ RS hardware an excellent tool for Hyundai because it is designed to work in rugged environments, and it precisely conditions and synchronizes a wide range of sensor types. The embedded web app enables engineers to immediately validate data on the spot to increase efficiency and make sure only the right data is captured.

It scales up to over 1,000 synchronized channels, and with flexible wireless connectivity, the measurement system can be securely accessed by any engineer, anywhere, with any device. Combined with Simcenter Testlab™ software, it provides everything engineers need to acquire high-fidelity test data and analyze results to enable efficient design troubleshooting and root-cause analysis.

Once they chose to implement the Simcenter solution, Kim says there were immediate benefits. “The compact size of Simcenter SCADAS RS made it much easier to fix it into the vehicle and connect all the sensor cables than with other solutions,” he explains. “Its ruggedness ensures it can withstand strong shocks and vibrations along with the wide operating temperature range typical for durability tests. The uninterruptable power supply unit is very helpful for preventing unwanted shutdowns and/or costly test reruns. Simcenter Testlab was also very straightforward to install and use.

"We found Simcenter SCADAS RS to be an extremely accurate and reliable measuring solution. It is also much easier to connect with a wide range of sensors. We can even read vehicle bus data in a specific communication protocol, like CAN-FD, which some similar solutions on the market do not support. The wireless connectivity for controlling the hardware embedded web application is very useful and the modular system architecture makes it easy to optimize the setup for both small and large test campaigns.”

Kim is also grateful for the after-sales support: “Siemens technical support was great from day one,” he says. “They trained our team so we could quickly become productive with the software and hardware, and we had regular visits from a Siemens engineer to explain more about the system and help us get the most from it.”

Since switching to Simcenter SCADAS RS, Kim says their efficiency has significantly improved. “In terms of the time spent setting up measurement channels during the preparation phase, we drastically reduced this by simply using a template rather than starting from scratch each time. And the real-time monitoring of the measurement progress with the web application made it much easier and faster to review the acquired data during the actual measurement. Thanks to all these features of Simcenter SCADAS RS, we estimate savings of one to two days over a two- to three-week testing program (a time savings of about 12 percent).”

Expanding testing possibilities with artificial intelligence

Kim is confident that Siemens Digital Industries Software will continue to play a key role in the development of products at his company. “We believe Siemens durability and systems analysis tools and noise and vibration analysis tools are excellent and will be important for Hyundai for our future development in areas such as electric vehicles, purpose-built vehicles, urban air mobility and robotics,” he says.

He’s also ready to take advantage of the latest artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “Recently, we’ve worked with the Siemens Engineering and Consulting services team to investigate the possibility of using a simplified 1D full vehicle model to predict the wheel forces for given road profiles for later use within a detailed 3D component fatigue analysis,” says Kim. “We’re looking at using a machine learning-based wheel force corrector approach based on real measured data and a 1D full vehicle model that I think will be an important tool for us in the future to stay ahead of competition.”