New simulation, testing software from LMS

Diesel Progress North American Edition, August, 2004

LMS International has developed an enhanced version of two of its best known engineering software systems. Virtual.Lab Rev 4 is a simulation environment for functional performance engineering, while LMS Test.Lab Rev 5 is an integrated software suite for noise and vibration testing and engineering.

"Since its market introduction, over 150 leading manufacturing companies around the world have implemented LMS Virtual.Lab to support their NVH and acoustics engineering processes, to optimize the reliability and lifetime performance of their products, and to analyze the structural integrity and system dynamics of their designs long before expensive prototype testing," said Werner Pohl, LMS corporate vice president and general manager of the company's CAE Division. "With LMS Virtual.Lab Rev 4, we continue to support engineers in analyzing more design alternatives more quickly and earlier in the process, and in setting new standards in productivity and process efficiency."

LMS Virtual.Lab offers an integrated software suite to simulate the performance of mechanical systems on attributes such as structural integrity, comfort, sound quality,, system dynamics, handling and durability. Rev 4 introduces a new LMS Virtual.Lab Morphing module that enables users to quickly modify existing Finite Element (FE) models into new models and to perform a multitude of analyses before complete CAD or new FE models become available. LMS Virtual.Lab Rev 4 also increases the performance and capability of all its integrated simulation applications, including moron, noise and vibration, interior and exterior acoustics and durability. New post-processing and optimization enhancements allow gaming deeper in sights faster, and retrieve the best-suited design options in the most efficient way.

With the introduction of LMS Virtual.Lab Rev 4, LMS continues to add new functionality and to extend the application reach of LMS Virtual.Lab. The LMS Virtual.Lab Structural Analysis configuration provides users of finite element analysis (FEA) tools, including CATIA CAE, MSC.NASTRAN or ANSYS, extended FE manipulation tools and pre-/post-processing capabilities for numerous types of FE analyses. LMS Virtual.Lab is engineered to transparently access the modeling and results data and make the structural solver an integral part of the Virtual.Lab simulation process.

The new Morphing module enables engineering teams to quickly morph or modify an existing FE model into new FE models corresponding to the new target design. This, LMS said, allows engineers to perform a multitude of analyses before complete CAD or new FE models become available and to deliver better design directives much earlier in the process. LMS Virtual.Lab Morphing also enables the engineering team to rapidly implement design changes and to study more variants in the same time window, the company said.

LMS Virtual.Lab Acoustics enables engineering teams to minimize the radiated noise or optimize the sound quality of new designs before prototype testing. With Rev 4, LMS Virtual.Lab Acoustics offers a complete process solution that combines convenient modeling capabilities with powerful solver technology and easy, interpretable visualization tools. It tightly links acoustic prediction to structural design, which supports users in easily modifying the structural FE model to assess the effect of design modifications. It even allows them to automatically optimize the acoustic performance of the design, while systematically updating the FE models.

With new Virtual.Lab Interior Acoustics, engineers can accurately model the vibro-acoustic behavior of a vehicle body and realistically simulate the interior sound of the vehicle. This allows users to study the effect of increasing the structural damping of the body, stiffening the roof or the floor panels, changing the volumetric absorption from vehicle seats, or adapting the trim thickness of specific body panels. LAdS Virtual.Lab Interior Acoustics includes cavity meshing capabilities that allow users to start from a structural full vehicle or trimmed body model and automatically generate the Finite Element mesh for the cavity. It supports the full simulation process in a single-user environment--from the creation of the acoustic vehicle model, over the prediction of system-level transfer functions, up to the refinement and optimization of the acoustic performance long before running prototype tests.

LMS Virtual.Lab Noise and Vibration Rev 4 offers system synthesis techniques for vibration predictions designed to significantly increase the speed of simulation runs. This, in combination with path, model and panel contribution tools, allows users to efficiently analyze the root cause of specific noise and vibration problems, LMS said. The modification prediction capabilities can assess noise and vibration performance of a design variant in minutes and quickly explore multiple options. LMS Virtual.Lab Noise and Vibration Rev 4 also provide extended tools to validate the accuracy of full-system simulation models. These tools compare the dynamic characteristics of virtual sub-system and component models with test models and validated virtual models. This, the company said, allows users to make comparisons between any combination of model types, including FE-FE, test-test and test-FE correlations.