Certify with Certainty

The climate change situation is getting ever more serious, as experts warn that we only have a few years to mitigate the damage before the Earth becomes a more difficult place to live. Automobiles are a huge culprit in emissions, and with over a billion passenger cars currently on the streets across the world, strict regulations have now been put into place to minimize the CO2 emissions. The Worldwide Harmonized Light Vehicles Test Procedure (WLTP) determines not only how to evaluate vehicle emissions and consumption but has also expanded to include how to report expected range for electric vehicles.

In order to better reflect what consumers experience when driving their vehicles, WLTP introduces much more realistic testing conditions, including higher average and maximum speeds, a greater range of driving situations, longer test distances, and more dynamic and representative accelerations and decelerations. These and other improvements provide a much more accurate basis for calculating a vehicle’s emissions and fuel consumption, and ensure that laboratory measurements better reflect a car’s on-road performance.

With many of the world’s biggest vehicle markets implementing the WLTP test standard, manufacturers need to be able to overcome the challenges it poses. With the simulation solution offered by SIMULIA, OEMs and suppliers can optimize vehicle and component designs in order to meet the more stringent limits on emissions. The entire vehicle can analyzed virtually with the interactions between different parts considered, giving engineers more scope to reduce emissions. Verifying emissions with simulations substantially reduces the risk of failing WLTP testing. Virtual prototyping also reduces the number of physical tests required, avoiding the backlog at wind tunnel facilities and cutting development time and costs substantially. Virtual testing is allowed as a substitute for physical testing in WLTP, and SIMULIA expertise helps users to set up a WLTP compliance regime that will be approved by the regulator.

Dassault Systèmes supports manufacturers for WLTP digital certification. The initial step is to demonstrate the set of vehicle variants for which the simulation can replace wind tunnel testing. Then simulation results for each vehicle can also be provided as services.