Challenge
World class automotive company Jaguar Land Rover’s approach is to seek opportunities in
technological developments and expertise to continually improve their development process
and product performance. Jaguar Land Rover and the Virtual Engineering Centre combined their
expertise in the development of scientific workflows, enabling them to optimise their modelling
and simulation processes, incorporating multiple disciplines and regression methods.
Approch
An integrated CAE process for maximising vehicle performance in pedestrian safety, according
to the EuroNCAP standards subject to structural stiffness constraints, was developed by the VEC,
using scientific workflows connected to high performance computing resources. Hundreds of
design variants were created, invoking powerful modelling tools though automatic procedures,
allowing the extensive exploration of the design space and vehicle’s performance. Regression
techniques, implemented by the University of Liverpool, were used in optimisation workflows,
leading to an optimal design. Seamless access to the supercomputing facilities provided by the
Hartree Centre was a key enabler for the project.
Benefits
Virtual engineering allows organisations to investigate the performance of products in the
early stages of their design process, minimising the use of physical prototypes and leading to
considerable reductions in time-to-market and manufacturing costs.
Elements of the developed workflows have already been adopted into the modelling process by
Jaguar Land Rover. Through this collaboration, the company was able to achieve a tenfold increase
of the investigated complex scenarios, using more than 3 million core-hours on the Hartree
Centre’s iDataplex cluster, Blue Wonder. The VEC provided fast interpretation and manipulation of
thousands of results, as well as improved designs, using accurate numerical methods.
