About the client

EDAG is an international corporate group active in the engineering services sector.

What did TECHNIA do?

During the development of their “Light Car” project, EDAG relied on TECHNIA and its CATIA V6 expertise.

What were the results?

The solution gave EDAG improvements in project development time, transparency, traceability and data consistency.

“The staff at TECHNIA are absolute professionals when it comes to system engineering. They were able to apply this expertise to the development of the battery module in a highly efficient way.”
Michael Hog, Director of Vehicle Integration, EDAG

Range and weight – the two main problems for electric cars. It is impossible to consider either of these aspects individually. During the development of their “Light Car” project, EDAG relied on TECHNIA and their CATIA V6 expertise.

Vision

A central view of the whole car allows for the interaction between the required parameters to be simulated in a multi-disciplinary and comprehensible fashion, thus making the development process for the battery module considerably more efficient.

The developers have christened their concept EDAG Light Car Sharing – an electrically powered car that anyone can rent, but no one has to buy. The car has been designed by development service providers from Fulda, especially for the car-sharing market.

To achieve the longest possible reach, EDAG optimized both the car structure as well as the battery module.

TECHNIA’s experts supported the car manufacturer in two ways: Supplying and ensuring an efficient use of the powerful software CATIA V6 as well as sharing their engineering expertise to develop long-lasting batteries.

Solution

More than 40 software solutions

Throughout the product development, EDAG sought to exchange expertise as this was the developer’s first project by which the interdisciplinary CATIA V6 platform was used to carry out a transparent simulation of the overall system. CATIA’s management module allows all parties to work simultaneously on the project. made available for all parties involved in development.

“Electromobility also presents new challenges for developers. We wanted to test the potential of V6 in practice, across all fields of development, and then draw conclusions from this for optimized development processes in the future,” explains Michael Hog, Director of Vehicle Integration at EDAG.

Reducing the number of interfaces involved seemed to be a very promising approach in this case – after all, EDAG currently uses around 40 different software solutions.

Design is in the details

The word “Light” in the projects title has a double meaning: On the one hand, it refers to the car’s special exterior lighting design, which is used to communicate the car’s current status.

If the car is currently charging, it lights up red and the word “Charging” is projected on the ground. With green light and the words “Rent Me”, the car indicates that it is free for hire. White light and “Reserved” signals that it is currently being used.

On the other hand,“Light” also refers to the car’s construction. By using fiber composite elements in the car body, its weight has been significantly reduced. The design has been well-thought-out to cater to temporary usage.

The unfavorable drag coefficient is hardly significant for a city vehicle. The cockpit has been reduced to a bare minimum in this car. Accelerator, brakes, steering wheel, indicators and a display that only shows the speed, battery condition, range, and navigational help. Sensors are used to automatically operate the heating, windscreen wipers, and lights.

Designing the battery

Finally, the only challenge left for achieving the longest possible reach was to develop a fully-optimized battery module in terms of performance and weight – a very crucial component in an electric car. EDAG brought TECHNIA and their partners Modelon on board to tackle the systems engineering.

First off, TECHNIA’s experts drafted the product specifications, for example with regard to driving performance, potential mileage, energy consumption, charging times, and battery life. This method of requirements management was then incorporated into ENOVIA V6. This degree of transparency saved a considerable amount of time and clearly helped to reduce errors.

In the next stage, known as “packaging”, all possible spatial configurations of the components within the vehicle were analyzed in CAD. For this purpose, the technical data sheets for the battery cells in question, together with their cooling units were stored in the database. The attribution of requirements for the whole vehicle was thus visible for all project participants.

The use of V6 3DLive and the ever-comprehensible version management system meant that it was very easy to visualize the project’s progress and the product details, even for users without any knowledge of CAD.

With the application of battery preselection and simulation, work moved more and more towards the practical implementation stage. The dynamic behavior of the battery module in use could be tested using the CATIA Systems simulation model. To do this, the battery types and all relevant data were modeled by Modelon, using Modelica as a basis.

This means that the different battery types could be used as variants of the model to create realistic simulations. It could thus be determined, which version was the best, in terms of performance, space dimensions and the requirements. Finally, the FEM was used to analyze the module’s thermo-management, after all, a considerable amount of energy is required to keep the battery cells at the optimum operating temperature.

Gains

EDAG’s use of CATIA V6 to achieve the coordinated rendering of the overall vehicle concept on e-components and the continuous depiction of the development process for the battery module can be seen as very forward-looking.

“The V6 solution with the integrated, multidisciplinary collaboration clearly has several advantages compared to the method of working with several different tools, particularly in terms of time, transparency, traceability and also offers us excellent data consistency,” says Michael Hog in summary.

Photo Copyright: EDAG Group

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