Showa Corporation – a Japanese supplier of components for the automotive and motorcycle industries – has completed the installation of a VI-grade high-quality steering simulator model with new variable damper.
The advanced simulator, based on the VI-CarRealTime and VI-GraphSim software solutions installed on RedHawk technology, has been used since its launch in 2014 to evaluate the performance of electric power steering systems in early stages of the development process. In addition, the steering simulator has been used to develop and fine-tune a cooperative control model in conjunction with a revolutionary variable damper model. This model, based on a theoretical approach property of Showa, estimates the vehicle states using the wheel velocity instead of sensors, enabling users to obtain dramatic improvements (also in terms of weight of the damper component) with respect to the usage of a conventional variable damper.
Meanwhile, VI-grade has also released version 17 of VI-CarRealTime, which features several usability enhancements in the following VI-CarRealTime related products: VI-Animator, VI-Road and VI-SuspensionGen.
Modeling enhancements for example include vehicle data obfuscation; FMI master update with full support for co-simulation including static analysis; definition of external suspension models using functional mock-up interface; enhanced advanced steering model with new type of friction and servo gear; suspension components steering dependency and skidplates to compute chassis-to-road plane impact forces.
