Marketing demands for new vehicle models often require the need for fundamental design changes.
Ford was building a 'rally' version of its basic sedan and needed to install a larger engine for performance. This required the vehicle suspension to be lowered to accommodate the new engine. It was taking the design team 6 weeks to calculate the impact of the changes for each design iteration. This was unacceptable, and they asked for a study to determine how this lead time could be reduced using the CAD tools they had available to them
A system was developed which automated the suspension mounting point modifications, in the CAD environment, necessary for each new position of the engine. From this the new suspension geometry characteristic for castor/camber and
toe-in could be calculated and output directly by the system. In addition, a full analysis of the new geometry to address industry standard use cases such as 'Pot Hole Braking' and 'Curb Strike' could be automated using the
new CAD geometry and a basis for a full ADAMS analysis.
The developed system was able to calculate the new suspension characteristics in a matter of minutes for each new configuration compared to 2-3 weeks by previous methods. In addition, the lead time to a full suspension analysis using ADAMS was reduced from 5 weeks to less than 3 hours. This enabled their design teams to significantly reduce the lead time for the analysis necessary to introduce new veicle configurations into their product portfolio.
As the consultant advising the customer of the potential benefits of automating their design/analysis/reporting processes I was responsible for the hands-on design, development, programming and final presentation to the customer at Senior Executive level. This was a very well received project and drove further automation projects with the customer.
This peice of work also led to my transfer to Detroit to repeat this work and other analysis automation tasks with Ford in Dearborn
