Joe_Little
06-07-2010, 10:13 AM
Hey Guys,
I am the Mississippi State Chassis/CAE Leader and I have about a year exp, a couple training seminars, and some "funded" experience using ADAMS, just thought I'd pass along some help. This tutorial is specifically for modeling suspension, hopefully I will find the time to complete a Full Car Simulation tutorial in the near future. The beginning of the tutorial briefly discusses how to get the program, free of charge, for your university and where to go to get instruction on how to get the FSAE example database up and running.
If you haven't heard of ADAMS (or you've just heard it bashed for its "friendliness"), ADAMS is the leading Multi-Body Dynamics simulation program in the world. ADAMS/Car is a template based variation of the basic interface, and is used by Ford, GM, Nissan, Michelin (the ones I've met in person) and many professional motorsports teams and simulation consultants. I would go so far as to say I believe every major car manufacturer is the world uses the program.
Since it's a dynamics engine "reverse-engineered" to be a automotive product, it isn't as easy to learn as a canned suspension program designed specifically for the task, but the program is capable of much, much, more. Co-simulation with MATLAB, flexible body importing from ABAQUS, NASTRAN, or ANSYS to analyze dynamic compliance and stress, and support for a variety of tire model including PAC 2002 provided by the tire test consortium are a just few on the long list of features.
ADAMS should not be your primary design if you have low-to-moderate design experience and need a suspension design in a few months. However, you should be able to get through this tutorial in a short amount of time, and in the long term ADAMS can have tremendous benefits (for your team and career).
For example, you could:
Simulate you car running the 2010 Michigan Autocross event, use Smart Driver to calculate the optimal driver inputs, with a flexible chassis generated by your FEA program, with aerodynamic drag acting on the car as specified by a user defined set of curves. You could then have ADAMS use this simulation for an optimization study, which could vary spring rates, damper curves, suspension geometries, CG location, tire type, engine output, etc. [there is virtually no aspect of the car that can't be parameterized in ADAMS]
Hopefully you’re interested, so without further adieu...
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/267247...0Tutorial%20v1.1.pdf (http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2672479/FSAE%20Tutorial%20v1.1.pdf)
This is a “beta” version of the tutorial, please let me know if there are any issues or if any of the steps need to be clarified. I will also try to answer basic questions, but, as I mention in the tutorial, much more qualified help is available through the MSC University forums.
P.S. If anyone uses WinGeo is have written some code that reads these files and outputs ADAMS formatted hard-point data . It's still a copy and paste affair at the moment, but still much quicker than spending 20 mins copying points. Let me know if you’re interested.
I am the Mississippi State Chassis/CAE Leader and I have about a year exp, a couple training seminars, and some "funded" experience using ADAMS, just thought I'd pass along some help. This tutorial is specifically for modeling suspension, hopefully I will find the time to complete a Full Car Simulation tutorial in the near future. The beginning of the tutorial briefly discusses how to get the program, free of charge, for your university and where to go to get instruction on how to get the FSAE example database up and running.
If you haven't heard of ADAMS (or you've just heard it bashed for its "friendliness"), ADAMS is the leading Multi-Body Dynamics simulation program in the world. ADAMS/Car is a template based variation of the basic interface, and is used by Ford, GM, Nissan, Michelin (the ones I've met in person) and many professional motorsports teams and simulation consultants. I would go so far as to say I believe every major car manufacturer is the world uses the program.
Since it's a dynamics engine "reverse-engineered" to be a automotive product, it isn't as easy to learn as a canned suspension program designed specifically for the task, but the program is capable of much, much, more. Co-simulation with MATLAB, flexible body importing from ABAQUS, NASTRAN, or ANSYS to analyze dynamic compliance and stress, and support for a variety of tire model including PAC 2002 provided by the tire test consortium are a just few on the long list of features.
ADAMS should not be your primary design if you have low-to-moderate design experience and need a suspension design in a few months. However, you should be able to get through this tutorial in a short amount of time, and in the long term ADAMS can have tremendous benefits (for your team and career).
For example, you could:
Simulate you car running the 2010 Michigan Autocross event, use Smart Driver to calculate the optimal driver inputs, with a flexible chassis generated by your FEA program, with aerodynamic drag acting on the car as specified by a user defined set of curves. You could then have ADAMS use this simulation for an optimization study, which could vary spring rates, damper curves, suspension geometries, CG location, tire type, engine output, etc. [there is virtually no aspect of the car that can't be parameterized in ADAMS]
Hopefully you’re interested, so without further adieu...
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/267247...0Tutorial%20v1.1.pdf (http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2672479/FSAE%20Tutorial%20v1.1.pdf)
This is a “beta” version of the tutorial, please let me know if there are any issues or if any of the steps need to be clarified. I will also try to answer basic questions, but, as I mention in the tutorial, much more qualified help is available through the MSC University forums.
P.S. If anyone uses WinGeo is have written some code that reads these files and outputs ADAMS formatted hard-point data . It's still a copy and paste affair at the moment, but still much quicker than spending 20 mins copying points. Let me know if you’re interested.