Lazer Lamps validated innovative automotive lamp designs with SimScale.

The Challenge

Reducing Weight of Automotive Headlamps

To reduce both the weight and complexity of the final product assembly, the design idea was to hold the reflector in place with the help of a plastic spring.

In order to validate the proposal, a simulation project was built up, with the following objectives:

1. Test if the nominal stress in the component is sufficient to prevent it from becoming loose during normal operations
2. Confirm that the stresses in the material are low enough to avoid any unacceptable level of plastic strain or fatigue
3. Verify whether the initial stress is high enough so that after 10 years in service, it is still sufficient to function well, considering material creep

How they solved it with SimScale

FEA to Test the Headlamp Design

For the virtual testing of their design, the engineers at Lazer Lamps chose the SimScale cloud-based simulation platform. The design component had been extracted by the Lazer Lamps engineers from the assembly, uploaded to the SimScale platform, and discretized under the SimScale mesh generation environment. Despite the high complexity of the geometry, it was still possible to use the automated mesh operation, which created a high-quality computational grid within minutes.

One great advantage of SimScale that the engineers from Lazer Lamps benefited from is the possibility to boost their own simulation project, through the free Public Projects. This resource contains numerous successful simulations, which can be used as templates for free.

All that the engineers at Lazer Lamps needed to take care of was to adapt the material properties and the center of displacement based on an existing public project.

The Results

Screwless Automotive Headlamp Design Validated

The simulation results verified that the screwless design approach can meet all the mechanical requirements: neither permanent plastic deformation nor creep of material will occur.

For analyzing the simulation results, the post-processing capability of SimScale was used.

The overall costs of this simulation for Lazer Lamps amounted to 10€ and the simulation working time took only one hour.