Automotive & Ground Transportation

Ground transportation is undergoing one of the biggest changes in its history. Be it passenger cars or commercial vehicles, off-road or agricultural vehicles, motorbikes or even rail: Manufacturers must deal with fierce global competition and market consolidation – with trends such as digitalization, autonomous driving, and electrification. Rigid standards are paired with high end-user expectations regarding reliability, sound quality, ride comfort, energy consumption, driving range, and price.

All ground vehicle and rail manufacturers are under pressure to optimize their entire value chain – from R&D to production – to gain a competitive edge. Advanced simulation, virtual and physical testing are key to shorter times to market at lower cost while maintaining the highest standards of accuracy, traceability, and quality assurance.

Your Partner Through the Entire Product Life Cycle  

When it comes to development and design, engineers face the constant challenge of delivering new generations of innovative products to the market while reducing time to market. 

 

HBK empowers designers with integrated measurement and analysis solutions that bridge the gap between simulation and physical testing, helping them to create safe, high-quality, and high-performance products while saving time and prototyping costs.  

Manufacturers are constantly looking to increase both profitability and customers satisfaction, which requires a balance between high-quality products, short development times and effective ways to reduce production costs. 

To forecast customer demand, in-line production processes must be flexible and agile to react to product changes while meeting high standards of accuracy.  

HBK also helps customers optimize the life cycle of assets by delivering solutions where advanced analytics convert low cost, readily available data into high-value information, providing a better understanding in areas such as operational performance and vehicle health and deterioration; and predicts future trends which serves as a basis for better decision-making.  

Key Areas of Application

Electric vehicles (EVs) are a rapidly growing market. New powertrains are being developed at a fast pace, requiring extensive testing and optimization. And how do auxiliary systems such as air conditioning or infotainment affect a vehicle’s electric behaviour?

 

HBK provides the entire measurement chain for electric power testing – from electric machine testing to complex inverter control testing. Acquiring mechanical and electrical signals simultaneously helps you to better understand and optimize the EV. 

Electric drivetrain and e-axles

High power density and high speed: Measuring vehicle performance at electric drives is challenging. Analysing new concepts such as e-axles creates additional problems. HBK offers a suite of dynamic solutions for high-speed measurements.

Certification, WLTP and range testing

Compliance with international standards and stringent test requirements are required to bring electric and hybrid vehicles to the market and to certify them accordingly. HBK provides power testing solutions for reliable and reproducible test results.

Combined electric and NVH testing

Noise and vibration determine how safe and comfortable a driver feels. Understanding how powertrain components impact noise and vibration and how to optimize their behaviour is critical. Combined testing for powertrain and NVH addresses this need.

Electric power measurement in production

Test equipment for production environments must be able to take accurate data and deliver reliable results for a go/no-go decision within split seconds. HBK’s testing solutions are designed with all End-of-Line (EOL) scenarios in mind.

Structural integrity testing determines a vehicle’s lifetime expectancy. It’s about validating designs and balancing weight and dimensioning, safe operation, durability and robustness, performance and reliability. How well will a component, an assembly, or the full vehicle withstand typical operating load conditions for a specified period?

 

Prior to running any lab or real-world tests in the field, validating structural integrity starts with a full simulation based on CAE-models. HBK’s seamless toolbox of simulation software, data acquisition hardware, powerful post-processing software, and test services was designed to reduce time and resources throughout all test cycles.

Shaker testing

Dynamics testing investigates and analyses the vehicle in motion, including its brakes, safety, and other sub-systems. With ever more stringent test requirements, make sure you have the best and most reliable test equipment at hand.

Squeaking brakes or rattling windscreen wipers are typical examples of unwanted noise in a car caused by mechanical vibration. As the driver can hear and feel it, it affects driving comfort and – more subtly – his or her perception of the car brand. Surely the driver of a luxury limousine is less likely to tolerate unwanted noise than the driver of a small city car. Hence how we assess noise is closely associated with what we expect. 

 

Measuring noise, vibration, and harshness (NVH) is a means for development engineers to evaluate noise levels and keep them within limits that are acceptable to most customers. Learn more about how HBK’s vast range of simulation, virtual and physical testing solutions can help you master any NVH challenges.

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Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and autonomous driving are two megatrends in automotive. Developing these systems and their highly challenging safety features implies complex and comprehensive testing, with massive quantities of data to be analysed faster than real-time.

 

HBK offers an integrated approach of simulation software as well as best-in-class sensors and powerful electronics for subsequent validation in virtual and physical testing. Why go for less than maximum efficiency and reliability in designing ADAS and autonomous driving systems?

Industry Segments

Industry Insights

  • 9/16/21

    Optimizing product development in a rapidly changing market: Part 1

    With high customer expectations, relentless competition and time criticality, businesses across the world are under pressure to shorten their product development cycles, while reducing cost and maintaining quality. We asked Jens Wiegand, Chief Technology Officer, at HBK, to elaborate on how global trends in product development are shifting and accelerating.

    Read more
  • 9/16/21

    Optimizing product development in a rapidly changing market: Part 2

    In this second part of our interview, Jens Wiegand, HBK’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and Senior Vice President of Electronics & Software share his thoughts on the role technology plays in shortening product development cycles without compromising quality and predicts the next big breakthroughs for the product development team.

    Read more
  • 5/26/20

    Predicting detectability in EVs

    Electric vehicles (EVs) are so quiet at low speeds that they can be a danger to pedestrians, cyclists, and other road users. So the challenge for car manufacturers is to create sounds that are detectable but not annoying.

    Read more

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