Dymola - the Tool for Multi-engineering Modelling and Simulation

In today’s world of increasing globalization and competition, automotive manufacturers are forced to reduce product development cycles, produce a wider range of cars and improve vehicle functionality. It is time consuming and costly to build prototypes and to make real experiments and measurements. In addition new materials and technologies, electronics, safety regulations and environmental requirements are all aspects that increase the need for more systems integration.

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Unfortunately, it has been difficult to exploit modelling and simulation of complete vehicles, integrating all of the mechanical, electrical, hydraulic and pneumatic components into one model. Current tools are generally too weak in treating multi-engineering models and they are not designed for models of the size and complexity required. The general tools are block-oriented and thus demand a huge amount of manual rewriting to get the equations into appropriate form. Moreover, there is a lack of model libraries which implies a lot of effort to develop models. For a part of a car such as the engine, transmission or chassis, there are specialized simulation tools that provide models, but they cannot handle components of other engineering domains in a reasonable way. It is also difficult to use them to model different parts of a car and then to merge the parts to make a model of the total car.

Dymola is changing the scene of modelling and simulation in the automotive industry. Users of Dymola have developed detailed vehicle models composed of more than 3000 components and 100,000 equations. The models are used to simulate complete vehicles which provide a unique and integrated approach to the analysis of vehicle acceleration, shift quality, fuel economy, emissions, vibrations etc.

Multi-engineering modelling and simulation

The multi-engineering capabilities of Dymola enable collaborative modelling where several departments jointly build models that give a more realistic representation of the entire system. To build a model of a complex system, such as a vehicle, competence in many different areas is needed. Thus it becomes essential to break up the overall problem into modular units during development. Dymola supports the decomposition and the re-assembly of the finished modular units.

Essentially, the use of Dymola’s multi-engineering capabilities leads to more effective collaboration and brings together experts in various engineering fields and enhances engineering productivity.

Flexible and open environment

The Dymola environment is completely open in contrast to many modelling environments that only have a fixed set of component models and proprietary methods for introducing new components. If a user of Dymola does not find a needed model in the available model libraries, it is possible to develop new components. This can be done from “scratch” or by using existing components as templates which can be adapted to match the user’s unique modelling and simulation need. The flexible and open modelling environment of Dymola is Modelica, an international, independent modelling language. The ability to easily create components makes Dymola an excellent tool to simulate new alternative designs and technologies such as hybrid-electric cars and fuel cells.

Dymola provides unique support for real-time and hardware-in-the-loop simulation (HILS). Dymola translates the models to efficient C code which is ideal for simulation in real-time. Using Dymola for HIL simulation means that more detailed models can be used, which results in less need for building physical prototypes. This essentially cuts development cycles and helps Dymola users to stay ahead of their competition.

If you want to investigate the capability of Dymola, please download the demo version at www.Dynasim.com.

Dynasim, the creator of Dymola, was founded in 1992. Today Dynasim has worldwide sales representation and customers in many countries. Dynasim offers on and off-site training sessions and user support. Dynasim is a member of the Modelica Association.

 

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