Applications and use cases for

3D CAE and MBSE collaboration

simercator enables you to share 3D simulation models across organizational boundaries for use in system simulations.

Use cases for simercator hub

Ready-to-use FEM models for systems engineering

A typical challenge in large organizations or along a supply chain is to integrate FEM simulation models for individual parts into system simulations. Today, the Functional Mockup Interface (FMI) allows the exchange of simulation models between a large variety of simulation tools. While previously only system simulation tools supported FMI, nowadays a growing number of FEM solvers or CFD tools can export and import simulation models as so-called Functional Mockup Units (FMU).

However, today there is no dedicated tooling to support the actual collaboration between FEM experts and system simulation engineers, reducing the exchange to a rarely executed, time-consuming and manual process.

By contrast, simercator enables FEM engineers to share ready-to-use FMUs with their fellow system engineers – including model and result traceability, fine-grained versioning and access control. In addition, simercator provides support to wrap models from FEM solvers without FMI capability into FMUs.

simercator also enables system engineers to evaluate FEM models directly in the browser and to download FEM models as FMU doppelgaengers for import into system simulation tools, leaving the original model on the server and not requiring any local dependencies for running FEM models.

Model management and traceability

simercator comes with integrated versioning and lifecycle management for your simulation models.

Use cases for simercator hub

Conveniently release updated models and deactivate outdated ones

For simulation model development regular maintainment of the model and, therefore, changing and updating the model is a must. Just like in software development this leads to different versions of the model living on the workstations of your colleagues and clients. Especially in large organizations this often becomes a challenge, when there is constant change, on the one hand, and you must guarantee traceability of both models and simulation results, on the other hand.

With simercator you can always stay in control about who uses your simulation model and which version is used. A rigorous process for uploading and releasing models on simercator hub is directly built into the system and helps the users of your models to get traceable and reproducible simulation results. No more uncertainties, but you will exactly know which model produced which results.. And even more: If you have to deactivate a model due to defects, you can do this with a single click and users cannot use it anymore.

Simulation data analytics

simercator allows you to learn how your model is used by your colleagues and clients.

Learn about usage anomalies and support your customers

When you deliver a simulation model to your client this is usually not the end of the story but just the beginning. Like for software, supporting your users and occasionally fixing bugs is a must, if you want to have satisfied clients. Usually you can only react to support requests from users.

With simercator’s data analysis functionalities this is not a one-way route anymore and you can actively cooperate with your clients: simercator models are streaming simulation model input and output to the server and, therefore, a rich dataset of usage data is created as a by-product of each simulation run.

simercator offers dashboards for visualization of usage data of your model and helps you to detect anomalies. This enables you to directly support your customers, if they use your model outside its validity range, or to better understand your customer’s future requirements to your product.

Energy and storage

simercator helps designing sustainable energy systems faster by making it possible to share component simulation models for system design simulation between system manufacturer and energy equipment supplier.

Problem when providing battery models today

Original simulation models for original parts

In energy system design the system manufacturers need to combine commercial-off-the-shelf products for power generators and storage into the most cost-efficient plant design so that the plant operator has minimal cost of ownership. Given investments for industrial energy systems that can range from a few millions to hundreds of millions of euros, simulation is used to find the best design.

There are numerous modeling and simulation tools that engineers rely on today. The major difficulty for simulation engineers is to get validated simulation models for the actual components that would be used in the real energy system. This is especially important, when assessing new technologies for sustainable energy like large scale energy storage, hydrogen electrolyzers, heat pumps etc.

To overcome this obstacle simercator provides component manufacturers with a secure and easy-to-use way to share simulation models as a service with their customers instead of distributing original models.

See our blog for the complete simercator-enabled workflow with a battery storage.

Automotive

simercator helps the automotive industry in the integration and tracing of computational models along the automotive supply chain.

Collaborative simulation in automotive design

A major challenge in the automotive industry is to virtually integrate subsystems into a vehicle and then to virtually validate the resulting complex product. Herein, simulation plays a crucial role. However, the required simulation models have to cross various boundaries.

Models from different suppliers are mostly generated from tools from different vendors. They have different level of detail (e.g. FEA, CFD, multi-body), cover different physics (e.g. solid mechanics, fluid mechanics, electromagnetics) and come in different mathematical problem classes (e.g. ODEs, DAEs, PDEs, discrete-event). Also, they have to cross organizational boundaries, like different departments inside a large company or from supplier to OEM. The Functional Mockup Interface (FMI) already allows the exchange of simulation models between a large variety of simulation tools. However, model and result tracing as well as model integration still lacks tool support.

By allowing model owners to offer simulation models as a service (SMaaS), simercator makes it easier for organizations to share computational models because they do not need to be physically distributed. Also, thanks to the built-in model and result traceability simercator supports a credible simulation process, e.g. by enabling both model users and owners to statistically compare simulation results following model changes.

Electronics

simercator supports electronics engineers to include circuit simulation models to multiphysics simulations like electro-mechanics.

Connecting electronics simulation and multiphysics

Simulation-driven development and exchange of simulation models between development partners is a standard procedure in electronics. This is greatly facilitated by the fact that most circuit simulators derive from the original SPICE software.

Integrating electronics simulation models into other physics simulations is difficult, in particular into multiphysics like electro-mechanics or mechatronics system simulation. Instead, the electronics is often represented by a coarse substitute model. This requires deep understanding of the electronics’ behaviour on part of the system engineers who mostly are no domain-experts in electronics. Consequently, substitute models are rather difficult to validate for them.

simercator helps to lift electronics simulation models into mechatronics system simulation as Functional Mockup Units (FMU) according to the well-established standard Functional Mockup Interface (FMI). The FMI has been designed to exchange system simulation models between tools from different vendors (as of 2023 more than 150 tools). simercator’s Python module also helps wrapping simulation models from SPICE simulation tools that do not yet support the FMI.

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