Fiat's Focus on Reducing NVH, Time

Reducing noise, vibration and harshness (NVH) in automotive powertrains is a time-consuming challenge. So when Fiat Group set an aggressive goal of cutting powertrain development work hours by 50% at its main research and design center, Elasis, near Naples, Italy, the NVH engineers knew that the status quo was untenable. Elasis is where most of the 2.8-million engines and 2.1-million transmissions the automaker produces each year are designed and engineered, so the workflow bottleneck wasn't a mystery. For example, NVH engineers used fragmented and often incompatible programs to predict noise and vibration levels in engines and transmissions, to head off problems including gear whine, valve rattle, driveline boom, or belt slap, early on in the process. The time spent exchanging data between multiple simulation programs--such as finite element analysis (FEA), multibody dynamics, vibroacoustics and radiated sound prediction--was the culprit slowing development.

Fiat brought in LMS Engineering Services (lmsintl.com) to deploy LMS Virtual.Lab Motion, a software platform that integrates FEA modeling, including data on loads and flexible body elasticity. The platform allowed engineers to run Siemens PLM (plm.automation.siemens.com) FEA software, NX NASTRAN, without leaving the LMS Virtual.Lab. At the same time, force data from the multibody simulations could be imported directly into the LMS Virtual.Lab, to predict noise and vibration. Throughout the design process, engineers pulled measurements from existing prototypes via another application, LMS Test.Lab, to calibrate models and validate results. Each of the LMS applications is constructed from the same basic platform, reducing the risk of errors that can result from manually transferring data between modules.

The result? Modeling and simulation tasks that previously took a few weeks now take a few days.