Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - February 2023 - 16

VIRTUAL
POWERTRAIN
DEVELOPMENT
Powertrain-development experts at the 2022 SAE COMVEC conference (left to
right): AVL's Thomas Howell, Eric Hruby of John Deere, Chang-Wook Lee from
the Paccar Technical Center, Cummins' Bob Tickel, and Paul Chambon of ORNL.
CONVERGE simulations of a hydrogen direct-injection engine. Shown
is hydrogen-air mixing using LES (left) and RANS (right) turbulence
models, run by Dr. Bifen Wu at Argonne National Laboratory.
These questions will be answered differently by difOak
Ridge
National
Laboratory's
investment
in highperformance
computing
enables
the
storage and
management of
large volumes of
simulation data.
simulation runtime by more than 50%, while maintaining accuracy.
Convergent Science said the team is exploring " innovative methods "
that could lead to another 80% runtime reduction to further improve
the computational efficiency of hydrogen combustion simulations.
Simulation data management
Capturing and managing the large volume of data generated through
simulation and modeling activities is a challenge, SAE COMVEC panelists
agreed. Cummins is working with Ansys and its Minerva tool, which
is powered by Aras, on enterprise-level simulation data management.
" We've been working on the tool, and we've pretty quickly gone
from tens to hundreds and now approaching thousands of users, "
Tickel said. " The point here isn't necessarily just to archive our models
and have them ready, but it's about reuse. Let's not rebuild models.
Let's not re-solve them. Let's have them there ready to go, and then as
technology and architectures change, we can pull down those models,
combine them and use them in different ways. "
Ansys Minerva is available for both on-premises and cloud deployment.
Companies must determine how they plan to proceed. " We're
doing lots of investigations around, is it on my local machine? Is it on
on-premises computing resources? An HPC [high performance computing]
system? The cloud? What are the tools that help connect these
things together? And how do we make this all work? " Tickel posed.
" So, we're stepping through this cautiously. Like anything, it comes
down to dollar and cents at the end of the day. "
16 February 2023
ferent organizations. For example, Paul Chambon, senior
R&D staff at Oak Ridge National Laboratory
(ORNL), provided a " tongue in cheek " response:
" We're a national lab and we fortunately have the fastest
computer in the world onsite. They want us to use
it as much as possible, so now we're looking at more
synergies between the different pieces of software to
make the most of all this processing power. "
The Frontier supercomputer at ORNL, which features 1.1
exaflops of performance, is reportedly the first to achieve
the exascale level of computing performance, a threshold
of a quintillion calculations per second. Testing and validation
of the system was expected to be finished by the
end of 2022, with full operation at the beginning of 2023.
AVL uses cloud computing from Amazon Web Services
" for quite a bit of our stuff, " Howell said. " There are some
things which we don't want to put on the cloud, so we
have some local servers, but a lot is in the cloud. "
John Deere also uses a balanced approach, said Eric
Hruby, staff engineer for power unit development.
" Our IT helps manage the interfacing, along with our
simulation department, how to execute and utilize the
various toolsets. "
Digital twins not a silver bullet
Physical prototypes will be obsolete within the next six
years thanks to digital twin solutions. That's the expectation
of 67% of respondents to an independent survey
of more than 2,000 professionals worldwide from various
industries that was recently released by Altair.
While that seems unlikely in the powertrain-development
realm, respondents' belief that digital twin technology
will reshape the way products are developed is
certainly a safe bet. The survey found that 36% say the
product-development timeline will speed up; 33% believe
the need for physical prototypes will be reduced;
and 28% say fewer simulations will be needed.
According to the survey, 69% of organizations are
already leveraging digital twins; 71% of those businesses
began investing in the technology in the past year.
TRUCK & OFF-HIGHWAY ENGINEERING
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: SAE/RYAN GEHM; CONVERGENT SCIENCE; CARLOS JONES/ORNL, U.S. DEPT. OF ENERGY

Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - February 2023

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