Success Story: How Simulation Helps in Automotive Headlamps Design
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, and in the process of setting the standard in automotive auxiliary lighting solutions. Strict quality standards and splendid product performances have assisted Lazer Lamps Ltd in being recognized as top leader in their field.
One of the innovative products from Lazer Lamps Ltd is a new type of motor sports headlamps, utilizing LED technology, that has been developed with help of the simulation technology from SimScale.
LED technology by Lazer Lamps (Source: http://www.lazerlamps.com/gallery)
Challenge
To reduce both 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 built up, with the following objectives:
- To confirm if 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 10 years in service, it is still sufficient to function well, under the consideration of material creep.
Simulation of the Headlamps
The design part of the headlamps 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.
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 can benefit from SimScale is a boost of their own simulation project, with the help of SimScale free 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 Ltd, all they needed to take care of was to adapt material properties and the center of displacement, based on one existing project.
Result
The simulation results verified that the screw-less design approach can meet all the mechanical requirements: neither permanent plastic deformation nor creep of material will occur.
Stress distribution on the reflector: The maximum stress occurs in the forefront of the clip as well and is not critical
The post-processing capability of the SimScale platform was leveraged to analyze the simulation results.
Visualization of the displacement of the plastic clips (values scaled by factor 10)
The resources needed for Lazer Lamps Ltd.’s headlamps 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 reduce it by taking the burden of both hardware and software infrastructure for the customers.
Should you have any questions about the SimScale platform, please contact support@simscale.biz. Our simulation support team is always glad to help you!
