Recent Advances in MSC/PATRAN Pre-Processing Software Allows Modeling of Complex Automotive Lamp Designs

Advances in automotive lamp designs have resulted in a more compact, aerodynamic packaging and the use of less expensive plastic materials for the lens and housing. The smaller packaging and lower melting point of plastics have increased the need for a predictive tool for simulating the lamp temperature rise under operating conditions. The modeling of lamps requires sophisticated analysis tools incorporating computational fluid dynamics and specular radiation. These tools use a finite element method to solve a system of non-linear equations for velocity, pressure and temperature. In addition to the non-linearity, the complex parabolic shape of the lamp reflector and lens requires very powerful mesh generation capability in order to produce an adequately refined mesh. The lamp modeling is performed in two stages. First the model is generated by importing CAD data from Pro/ENGINEER or Unigraphics into the MSC/PATRAN preprocessor. The surfaces are then meshed with triangular elements which are used as a seed for creating the air volume and lamp solid wall tetrahedral element meshes. The use of the new MSC/PATRAN hybrid tetrahedral mesher has enabled the creation of very complex 3D element meshes to represent fluid volumes with several hundred thousand elements. MSC/PATRAN has become a common pre/post-processor for many analysis codes because of the open CAE environment, advanced meshing capability, ease of applying loads and boundary conditions and effective post-processing capability for displaying results.