Car service technology,Customer Satisfaction Guarantee on virtual screens concept, Employees check the conditions of quality warranty and service repair auto part of car service process

Automatic adaptation of simulation models to 3D scans

The challenge

When producing vehicles, it is essential to achieve a high level of manufacturing quality. This includes compliance with shape and position tolerances of exterior components, as these have a significant influence on the gap and flush dimensions of vehicles and therefore determine the external appearance. For this reason, quality assurance includes checking the dimensional accuracy of the exterior components in question. For this purpose, they are mounted and measured on a so-called master jig. The master jig is a physical testing device with which the quality of the gap and flush dimensions can be determined. In the process, lead dimensions must be set so that the actual component is positioned as well as possible (dimensionally accurate) in relation to the neighboring components. This physical process, with the construction of a prototype, is time-consuming and cost-intensive. To reduce complexity and costs, this process should be digitized.

The implementation

A digital process has been developed that completely digitizes the original physical process. The relevant components are scanned using a 3D scanner. The result is a digital image of the component in the form of a point cloud. In order to carry out the simulation of the gap and flush dimensions correctly, it is necessary for the simulation models to correspond to the real components. For this reason, a procedure was developed using the inpro CAE toolkit simano to automatically adapt the simulation models to the 3D scans of the physical components. This also takes into account invisible internal components and adhesive beads and generates a digital simulation twin of the physical components.

The result

The virtual master jig is in use at Volkswagen: inpro provides the central reverse engineering algorithms for this. In this case, the inpro algorithms were connected to the FEM simulation software ANSA. This provides the simano calculation kernel with the necessary parameters and FEM grids via a generically adapted interface. It is therefore an important building block for the virtualization of quality assurance.

What our customers say

“simano enables us to adapt our simulation models based on the real components with high performance. inpro provides us with central algorithms for the virtualization of the master jig. This allows us to save time and costs.”