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Industry

Education

Business challenges

Integrate an electric motorand energy storage system

into a production modelvehicle

Keys to success

NX quick routing functionalityfor wires and tubes

Finite element analysis

Visualization of complex

assemblies

Use of digital data for stress,crash and ow analyses

Results

Packaging studies completed

in weeks or days vs. months

Fast design changes keepteam up-to-date with contest

rule changes

One software solution formany disciplines

Students model complexshapes after only minimal

instruction

NX helps engineering studentstransform Saturn Vue to cleanand green

Clean competition

The University of Ontario Institute of

Technology (UOIT) is one of 17 NorthAmerican Universities participating in

EcoCAR: The NeXt Challenge, a three-yearengineering competition established by

the United States Department of Energy

and General Motors, and managed byArgonne National Laboratory. The compe-

tition challenges the participants to reducethe environmental impact of vehicles by

minimizing fuel consumption and reducingemissions while retaining the vehicle’s

performance, safety and consumer appeal.Students use a real-world engineering

process to design and integrate their

advanced technology solutions into a 2009Saturn Vue.

UOIT’s EcoCAR team is turning the gaso-

line-powered Vue into a full-functionelectric vehicle. Such a dramatic transfor-

mation posed a number of engineeringchallenges for the students, including

designing and integrating a fairly large

onboard energy storage system (ESS) intothe competition vehicle. To qualify for the

project and receive an actual vehicle, theteam had to demonstrate the validity of its

concept through virtual simulations. GMsupplied a digital model of the Vue and the

UOIT team used the NX™ digital product

NX

www.siemens.com/nx

University of Ontario Instituteof TechnologyAcademic competition leads the way to a new electric car

development solution from Siemens PLMSoftware on three main areas of the ESS:

wiring layout, thermal management andstructural component design and mount-

ing. The team created a unique battery

mounting approach that incorporates wir-ing looms, chassis mounts and a thermal

management system. The students alsoproved the validity of their design by con-

ducting nite element analyses using NX

Nastran®. This enabled them to avoid anypotential performance failures and theneed to test physical prototypes.

Wiring made easy

The proposed ESS required high-voltagewiring running the length of the battery

tray to connect the batteries, as well as

wiring to connect the motor with the bat-tery management system. The limited

amount of space in the existing vehicle

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“Without software such as

NX Nastran, the complexityof our design would take an

unrealistic amount of time

to analyze within the con-

text of the EcoCAR competi-

tion. The software provided

great time savings and

accurate results.”

Shawn Sandham

Automotive EngineeringStudent and EcoCAR Team

Member

UOIT

made wire routing a challenge. “It would

have been difcult if not impossible to dothis work using 2D routing diagrams andengineering drawings,” says Nicholas

Shopian, an automotive engineering stu-dent at UOIT and an EcoCAR team

member.

“A three-dimensional digital model and the

NX quick connect tool provided a rapidway to set up several points and generate

a wiring path,” Shopian continues. “Thismade it relatively simple to see the high

voltage lines laid out inside the ESS

module. With the wiring laid out, it alsoallowed for several necessary changes tobe seen, enabling the wire routing to

safely clear all obstructions. The electrical

routing tool proved invaluable when gen-erating a wiring design. Using the routing

tool and with all of the other systems intheir place, it was possible to ensure any

one system would not overlap and that theproper clearances were maintained.”

Temperatures controlled

To maintain the ESS at the correct operat-ing temperature, the team had to nd a

way to extract internal heat buildup and

also to supply heat to the system if neces-sary. The proposed thermal management

system encloses all the batteries withsmall Teon or nylon cooling tubes. A sys-

tem of this nature was very hard to visual-

ize on such a large scale. Determining thequantity of material necessary for con-

struction was another problem.

The students used NX to design the ther-mal management system around a central

supply line and one main return. With

these laid out, routing software was usedto construct the individual battery cooling

system. This was done with the NXmechanical routing application using

mostly the quick path tools. The mechani-cal routing application allowed for easy

layout of the main path, and then for sev-

eral iterations to be made based upon thenumber of batteries in each stack to gen-

erate the entire system. After all of theindividual pipes were made, they were

then linked into the main tees and themain line.

One very helpful feature was the volume

calculation tool, which was used to deter-

mine the amount of material needed forconstruction. The use of NX was also help-ful for seeing how the various systems t

together and if there was any

interference.

Secure attachment

Perhaps the biggest challenge encoun-

tered over the course of the preliminarydesign related to packaging the ESS mod-

ule and feasibility of the proposed supportstructure. To achieve the desired range

and vehicle performance, it was deter-

mined that 88 to 90 battery cells wererequired. With an individual cell weight of

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Solutions/Services

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Customer’s primary business

Founded in 2002, the Univer-

sity of Ontario Institute of

Technology (UOIT) offers anew type of degree that is

putting it at the top of theclass in student and employer

satisfaction surveys. Clean andgreen are at the core of UOIT’s

research and academic pur-suits. Wind, solar, nuclear,hydrogen and more are all

under the microscope. UOIT’sundergraduate and graduate

programs provide pathways tothe jobs and careers

of tomorrow.

www.uoit.ca/ (University)www.uoit.ca/ecocar/

(EcoCAR team)

Customer location

Oshawa, Ontario

Canada

ve kilograms (approximately 11 pounds)

this capacity translates to a signicant

amount of additional mass.

Using the digital model of the existing

vehicle, students used NX to take measure-ments and then design components. Thisprocess was crucial in testing overall t

and design feasibility to ensure that the

ESS module integration would in fact bepossible. The team performed structural

analyses of the proposed design using NX

Nastran to ensure that displacements andstresses were within acceptable limits for

individual components and assemblies.

NX makes it possible

“A competition of this magnitude would

not be possible in the context of an aca-demic setting without software such as

NX,” says the co-leader of UOIT’s EcoCARteam, Mike Maduro. “We wouldn’t have

the time or the resources. We are basicallyredesigning a vehicle. It would be

extremely expensive to do packaging stud-

ies by putting rapid prototypes together,and it would probably take six months to a

year. That would put us out of the run-ning. Using NX, we are doing packaging

studies in weeks, even days.” Dr. GregRohrauer, the team’s faculty advisor,

notes, “The complete vehicle model sup-

plied by GM is very large, constituting over10 gigabytes spread across thousands of

parts. However, with our $3,000

(i7-920 based) workstation running NX,we can open the entire model at once and

navigate to any area nearly as fast as onecan drag the mouse. My students habitu-

ally section across the entire vehicle torene on our very tight packaging

constraints.”

Another area where the NX suite of tools

has been especially helpful is for quicklymaking design modications, such as

those required in response to contest rulechanges. One recent change involving

ground clearance could have been disas-

trous for the UOIT team, whose batterypack ts below the vehicle. “We had to

basically move everything up an inch,”says Maduro. “Without the ability to easily

modify an assembly in NX, that wouldhave been impossible.”

NX is the only CAD solution being used byUOIT’s 20-person EcoCAR team, which con-

sists of electrical, industrial, mechanicaland software engineers. Maduro notes

that the students are doing amazing thingswith NX, pointing out, “They are modeling

shapes I would have thought required a 3Dscanner to create.”

In subsequent years of the three-year

EcoCAR competition, the team plans to useNX to conduct ow and crash analyses.