Research On Process Automation For CAE Pre-processing Of A Chassis Frame Based On KBE And HyperWorks

With the rapid growing competition in the automotive industry, it is very urgent for the enterprise to shorten the exploitation cycle of production, improve the design quality and to launch new products so as to respond the market. The production of new products is a very complicated process, which is involved with abundant engineering design knowledge. With the increasing maturity of finite element theory and algorithm and the development of computer software and hardware technology, the application of CAE software can help the enterprise shorten the exploitation cycle of production, which is an indispensable technological means in the design phase of automotive products. However, in the process of traditional CAE pre-processing, the development of CAE technology is blocked by the problems, such as complicated operations, low analysis efficiency and excessive dependence on engineering experience.HyperWorks is a kind of large-scale and commonly used CAE software and has a very strong secondary development function. It can solidify the standard analysis process into the routine and realize the automation of some operation. However, there are still some problems, like limited expansion capability and unable to update timely. This paper introduced the knowledge based engineering (KBE) into the CAE analysis process, explored the application of KBE technology in the CAE field, combined the HyperWorks secondary development function and developed a pre-processing process automation system which can solve the problems above in a proper way.The key technology of KBE is knowledge acquisition, knowledge representation, knowledge management and application. Based on the development environment of SQL Server2000, this paper built a specialized CAE knowledge base which can store, manage and call the key data and knowledge in the pre-processing process. This paper also introduced the secondary development environment of HyperWorks and the process of how to develop the automation platform in detail. Through the analysis of the pre-processing process, this paper built the process automation platform and linked the platform and the CAE knowledge base, which can help call the key data.Based on KBE and HyperWorks, this paper built a specialized CAE knowledge base and a pre-processing process automation platform, which was applied into the finite element modeling, modal analysis, static analysis and structural optimization of a chassis frame. Through the comparison with the traditional pre-processing method, it was demonstrated that the process automation system could effectively simplify the operations, reduce human intervention, and therefore increase analysis efficiency dramatically and help shorten the exploitation cycle of production, which is conducive to the inheritance and development of the corporation's knowledge and can be applied to engineering practice in a proper way.