Automotive Headlamp Design with Simulation

Founded in 2010, one of SimScale’s customers, the British manufacturer Lazer Lamps Ltd, is at the forefront of LED technology, bringing world-class technology to its clients. Lazer Lamps is in the process of setting the standard in automotive auxiliary lighting solutions. Strict quality standards and splendid product performances have assisted Lazer Lamps in being recognized as top leader in their field.

One of the innovative products from Lazer Lamps is a new type of motorsports headlamp that utilizes LED technology and has been developed with the help of the simulation technology from SimScale.

LED technology by Lazer Lamps - Headlamps — LED technology by Lazer Lamps

Challenge

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 idea, a simulation project was created with the following objectives:

To confirm whether the nominal stress in the component is sufficient to prevent it from becoming loose during normal operations;
To confirm that the stresses in the material are low enough to avoid any unacceptable level of plastic strain or fatigue over time;
To confirm whether the initial stress is high enough so that after ten years in service, it is still sufficient to function well, taking material creep into consideration.

Simulation of the Headlamp

The design part of the headlamp had been extracted 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.

Mesh with SimScale — High-quality mesh created with the automated tetrahedral meshing operation for structural analysis. This operation creates an adaptive mesh based on a geometry and an overall mesh resolution level.

One great advantage that customers get when using SimScale is the ability to boost their own simulation project with the help of the free SimScale Project Library. This resource contains numerous successful simulations, which are available to be imported into the customer’s own workspace. For the engineers from Lazer Lamps, all they needed to think about was adapting the material properties and center of displacement of one existing project.

Result

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.

Stress distribution on a reflector with SimScale — Stress distribution on the reflector: The maximum stress also occurs in the forefront of the clip and is not critical.

The post-processing capability of the SimScale platform was leveraged to analyze the simulation results.

Visualization of the displacement of plastic clips with SimScale — Visualization of the displacement of the plastic clips (values scaled by factor 10)

The resources needed for Lazer Lamps’ headlamp simulation project:

Working time for the user: approximately 1 hour
Overall costs for running the simulation: approximately €10

Considering the investment in terms of both money and time, SimScale can substantially benefit the customer by taking on the burden of the hardware and software infrastructure needed.

Should you have any questions about the SimScale platform, please contact support@simscale.biz. Our simulation support team is always glad to help you!

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