The shortening of the current development cycles for commercial vehicles puts a higher focus on virtual testing compared to physical testing. At the same time, more items are subject to testing requirements in order to increase the quality of the vehicles and new markets introduce new requirements on the same vehicles. All these factors increase the demand for simulation at Scania along with the expressed goal to integrate virtual simulation into the product development cycle much more explicitly than before. In order to meet the new demands for both more accurate and also a higher number of simulations, the chassis simulation department has looked into updating the assembly tool that started to be developed, together with Altair, in 2006. The new tool has been developed together with Altair since the end of 2013 with the expressed goal to use a lot of the new core functionalities that are available within the HyperMesh software of today and keep the customisation to a minimum. This presentation is aimed to present the current status of the tool and some of the challenges that are still ahead of us. Speakers Niklas Torstensson, Scania VC AB

1. Niklas Torstensson
Senior Engineer
Dynamics and Strength Analysis
Scania CV
A new model assembly tool for chassis at Scania

2. Your date
here
Info Class Internal
Department/Name/Subject
Scania
Subsidiary of the Volkswagen group

3. Early initiatives to streamline the process of assembling a simulation model by the
chassis department:
• Early 2000, Fortran code working on the Abaqus input deck to create the
fasteners
• 2006, Start of development of the first Session Browser together with Altair
Nordic
• Autumn 2013- , Start of development of the “new” Session Browser together
with Altair Nordic
Background
We spend too much time building models compared to evaluating results.

4. Assembly tool – Session browser
Incorporated within the Assembly browser tab
Main Feature
• Keep the structure tree from our PDM
system.
• Connect the individual models using the
connectors into a complete assembly.
Secondary Features
• Preparation steps to facilitate the use of
connectors.
• Convenience features to help managing
the individual part models and
subsystems.
• Features to help modify the tree structure.
• Consistent naming of
sets/surfaces/properties and components.
• Access to a batchmesher from the
Session Browser tree.

5. Step 1: Preparation
Converting the 3dxml to the udmxml format that the assembly browser uses.
Restructuring the PDM tree into a more streamlined simulation tree (fewer levels,
prefixes to facilitate a consistent naming convention).
Create a quick view version of each geometry (line elements on the contour).
Creating the initial connector file for the fasteners that are present in the current
structure.
PDM system  Structure (3dxml) Hypermesh (udmxml)

6. Step 1: Preparation
Quick view of each geometry (line models of the contour)

7. Step 2: Meshing of individual components
and creation of subsystems
• Batch meshing
• Manual meshing
Parallel component model creation

8. Step 3: Assemble the complete model

9. Step 3: Assemble the complete model

10. Summary
• The browser is working and it does speedup the building of models and
especially the “complete” vehicle models.
• We are finishing up the first “official” release in the near future (a few loose ends).
• Waiting for a few missing functionalities (makes an appearance in the next
version) .

11. Thank you for the attention