My name is Dirk De Vis.
I am Vice President LMS Engineering at Siemens PLM.
We recently opened a new test facility in Lyon, France, that focuses on optimizing fuel
economy for vehicles and the global transportation industry.
Fuel economy has become an important driver in the automotive industry.
Ever since the crisis in the second half of last decade, that has changed buying behavior
of the customers and also has driven the car manufacturers to create new technological innovations,
to bring new types of cars that are way better and more efficient, that avoid global warming,
to bring those new technologies to the market.
The new test facility in Lyon builds upon what we, as a company and LMS Engineering,
always have been standing for.
It combines simulation with testing.
Now, the innovative part of the facility in Lyon is that we address fuel economy at the
full vehicle level.
So, we put a full vehicle on a dyno in a controlled climate room.
That’s innovative, because we have seen from our customers, we’ve heard from our
customers, that when you do optimization for an engine on an engine dyno, for a transmission
on a transmission dyno, when you ultimately build everything together that actually the
resulting fuel economy is not what was predicted on the individual parts.
So bringing it all together in a single dyno, is really innovative.
On top of that of course we have to instrument it, and that’s a drawback.
We have to instrument it with lots of sensors.
So it is a very well instrumented car in order to measure all of the energy flows on the
different subsystems.
That means instrumentation in different domains; mechanical domain, electrical domain,
hydraulic domain, temperature domain.
All of that brings everything together.
Now, it also offers the capability to suppliers, not only to car makers, but also to suppliers
to actually go and test in a full vehicle condition their individual components.
So you don’t have to take out components from a vehicle
to actually test them in individual benches.
We’re aiming essentially at 3 categories of projects.
First category is benchmarking and target setting, where we do full vehicle testing
on competitive vehicles, to map out the energy flows,
how competitors have made their vehicles so efficient.
We do in-depth studies on vehicles of the customer in order to prepare the models to
do design what-if studies, to develop new architectures, and to evaluate what solution
should be put in place.
Out of all that information, the models and the testing, we derive targets and objectives
for new vehicle developments.
A second range of projects is more in the area of multi-attribute balancing.
Fuel economy is very important.
But customers only want a car which is still, equally as comfortable, has the best driving
pleasure as ever.
So what we aim with the test rig is to combine those 2 things together.
And to assure that there is a very well balanced vehicle that comes out of that, combining
the different attributes for the customer.
And the third area of projects lies more in the area of troubleshooting and final refinement.
I know that the strategy is to frontload the decisions, to do early designs, to do simulation.
But unfortunately many times there are still issues on vehicles that come to the market.
We support our customers with this test rig, to do a multi-attribute balancing and multi-attribute
refinement to actually bring those prototypes to the right state of refinement.
To conclude we have invested in a test facility to complement our modeling offer for fuel economy.
We have a history of being very accurate in offering to our customers a support for modeling
of fuel economy.
By adding this test capability, we now bring to our customers the capability of solving
their real issues, going from modeling into testing and modeling and testing together
into development support.