Toyota Drastically Reduces Simulation Time with Automatic CFD Pre-Processing

Creating a detailed, ready-for-simulation CFD model for automotive applications normally requires a huge amount of manual work. Toyota Motor Europe challenged us to find a solution for this problem that every OEM faces and that significantly affects total design turnaround time. Result: they managed to completely eliminate this manual process thanks to an innovative CFD pre-processing workflow.

Toyota watertight geometry surface with automatically created sealing patches

Accurately predicting external aerodynamics, heating, ventilation, and air conditioning of vehicles requires setting up simulation domains that consist of a high number of components in CAD format. The main difficulty in working with so many components is creating the so-called watertight surface that is needed to be able to perform proper CFD analysis with a finite volume solver. This requires closing gaps, eliminating surfaces that are not in contact with the fluid, and solving interference issues before a surface and volume mesh can be generated. These tasks are usually performed manually, by using pre-processing software with CAD handling and mesh-generation capabilities, and they take a considerable amount of work and time.

The automatic CFD preprocessing workflow allowed us to reduce our total lead time and the amount of man-hours respectively by 91% and 97%

"At Toyota Motor Europe we have chosen Autoseal and Hexpress to become our standard workflow for CFD preprocessing. It allowed us to reduce our total lead time and the amount of man-hours respectively by 91% and 97%, yet provides high quality meshes with excellent layer coverage, consistently. Due to the high level of automation and standardization, creating a mesh from CAD does not require long training" 

Antoine Delacroix, Manager Vehicle Performance Engineering R&D at Toyota Motor Europe NV/SA

In a Cadence hosted webinar, Antoine Delacroix, Manager of Vehicle Performance Engineering R&D at Toyota, explains in detail how they managed to entirely remove this manual part of the process by setting up an automatic pre-processing workflow combining Autoseal’s powerful gap closing capabilities with the Cadence Fidelity Hexpress volume-to-meshing approach. This process allows them to generate ready-to-run models in an instant, with practically no human intervention, drastically reducing simulation turnaround time.

Click below to watch the full webinar and learn how they did it:

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