During the NAFEMS World Congress 2023 in Tampa, Florida, 15-18 May, ASDL won the Innovative Use of Simulation Technology Award, which is sponsored by Siemens. The recognition was for the paper “Decision Making and Visualization Tool for Automotive Vehicle Setup,” presented by PhD student Mariam Emara, and co-authored by Dr. Michael Balchanos, Dr. Burak Bagdatli, and Prof. Dimitri Mavris.

Mariam’s presentation represented ASDL’s research towards reduced prototype testing through the use of digital representations and high fidelity, physics-based modeling, and simulation techniques. The development of the methodology was initiated in 2021, with the support of a major Automotive OEM, and the completion of two Grand Challenge projects: 1) Data-calibrated, physics-based model for kinematic vehicle simulations (ARCADE), and 2) Virtual track testing and fastest lap optimization (GT-FOUR), using the baseline GT-4 Spec race car model developed under ARCADE.

In the work recognized by NAFEMS, Mariam presented and demonstrated a parametric decision-making environment enabled by simulation-based tradeoff analysis, using surrogate models of vehicle kinematic tests. This capability is essential for time and cost savings in automotive vehicle production, and particularly in motorsports, where physical testing of the different designs, car setups, and track scenarios can be very expensive, time consuming, or constrained due to regulations. In this example, this decision-making capability is supporting vehicle suspension setup selection, while ensuring performance targets are met, and regulatory compliance for the selected setup is also satisfied. The presentation to NAFEMS demonstrated a use case for virtual Kinematics & Compliance (K&C) testing and selection of suspension setup options for racecar tuning, while utilizing animations of the suspension system model behavior for different K&C test cases.

The NAFEMS World Congress brings together the global engineering simulation community and focuses on pushing the technology to create a cross-industry, cross-technology exchange of ideas, best practice, and information and to make simulation ever better and ever more accessible. For this year’s 2023 NAFEMS World Congress, ASDL was represented by Mariam and fellow graduate student Tavish Pattanayak, who presented two technical papers, as well as Research Engineer Dr. Michael Balchanos.

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