Customer Background

BYD has established a Central Research Institute, an Electronics Institute, an Automotive Engineering Institute, and an Electric Power Research Institute, responsible for R&D of high-tech products and technologies and for industry and market research. It has professional teams that can provide product design and project management in hardware, software, and testing, with fully independent development experience and data accumulation across many products, gradually forming a distinctive, internationally competitive technology-development platform. Research fields include conventional fuel vehicles, pure EVs, BIW, interior and exterior trim, hybrids, chassis, electrical systems, and more.

Customer Requirements

Automotive-industry statistics show that after applying CAE, the share of new-vehicle development-phase cost in development cost fell from 80%–90% to 8%–12%. The automotive industry is growing rapidly and competition is increasingly fierce. In this context, new products are launched faster and faster, placing ever-higher requirements on CAE applications. CAE provides technically central assurance for the industry’s rapid development and can bring enterprises huge technical and economic benefits.

CAE analysis in the automotive industry mainly includes three key parts:

1. Full vehicle: CAE in this part usually covers kinematics and dynamics simulation to model ride comfort, comfort, and passability. A full-vehicle virtual prototype must be built to determine vehicle parameters.

2. Major assemblies or large subsystems: a vehicle is usually divided into four systems: body, chassis, engine, and electrical/electronic systems. Parameters determined in full-vehicle analysis are decomposed to each assembly, which then undergoes CAE analysis to confirm that those parameters can be realized.

3. Parts and small assemblies: this part mainly performs CAE on parts (sub-assemblies) such as doors, door seals, engine blocks, suspension, panels, crankshafts and pistons, intake and exhaust systems, tires, and wheels, to determine whether their mechanical properties meet overall design requirements, or to optimize and further improve the initial design.

Through CAE simulation of these key parts, product performance in all aspects can be grasped at the concept-design stage. CAE virtual testing also lets the vehicle begin digital simulation testing from the concept stage. Compared with traditional trial-and-error physical tests, it not only saves large amounts of labor and material cost, but more importantly saves time for mold and sample trial production, greatly shortening the overall product R&D cycle.

Solution

Starting from the customer’s actual situation, Sugon tailored a new CAE simulation computing system for BYD. After deployment, the system delivers strong computing performance with good usability, clearly raising research efficiency and effectively compressing the product-development cycle. Since completion, the CAE simulation system has hosted crash, structural optimization, external flow-field analysis, noise analysis, engine fatigue analysis, and many other applications.

Customer Benefits

As BYD’s research into EVs and hybrids deepens, electromagnetic effects in automotive systems engineering have grown, such as fast charging and control-system electromagnetic-interference immunity, becoming new hotspots in automotive CAE. Construction of the CAE computing platform provides important technical support for BYD’s new-vehicle R&D and production.