Millbrook uses nCode GlyphWorks to deliver unrivalled vehicle test service

Development of testing ground’s capabilities

Testing is an extremely important yet time-consuming and demanding task in the development of new vehicles. Test centers like Millbrook are continuously investigating new strategies and approaches that improve the quality of results delivered to the customer while reducing program costs and timescales. “We are constantly developing new approaches and creating a forward thinking ethos in testing,” said Chris Polmear, Millbrook’s Senior Engineer, Vehicle Measurement Group. As part of their research, Millbrook engineers attended a free seminar on Large-scale Customer Vehicle Usage Monitoring hosted by HBM-nCode. The seminar included a number of presentations on how vehicle testing could be improved, such as “Vehicle Usage Profiling and Proving Ground Optimisation” and “Bringing the Proving Ground into the Laboratory and on to the Desktop” by Dr. Andrew Halfpenny, Chief Technologist of nCode products. Demonstrations shown at this seminar ultimately led Millbrook to select nCode GlyphWorks to support the development of new testing approaches for determining brake usage and braking energy.

Millbrook has a comprehensive array of surfaces, including an area comprising sinusoidal and random waveforms with coarse blacktop, “cats eyes” and other eye-watering, suspension-jarring features.

Proving ground correlation

 

Chris Game, Millbrook’s Principal Engineer for Special Projects, comments, “GlyphWorks provides us with an intuitive platform for enhancing our process for correlating for events”. Millbrook engineers use built-in functions provided in GlyphWorks to easily calculate time history plots for many of the required vehicle parameters such as effective engine power, braking power and tractive power. Specifically, the GPS Processing glyph is used to automate the calculation of these vehicle quantities from low sample rate GPS signals. By calculating these parameters, engineers can gain insight into the performance and power requirements of a vehicle by simply analysing GPS and basic CAN bus data instead of using additional instrumentation.

Exceeding customer’s expectations

Millbrook has extended the use of nCode GlyphWorks for a number of other measurement and analysis tasks on the testing ground. One application is the development and sizing of regenerative braking and energy recovery systems by using GPS data analysis. Proving ground correlation is another application which combines brake testing with the estimation of the energy of each braking event to optimize the usage of the proving ground. This capability, called Optimized Testing in GlyphWorks, is used by Millbrook to assess the distribution of braking energy events across all of the test track surfaces and optimize a duty cycle to match the required real world usage. Millbrook now incorporates Optimized Testing into vehicle development projects, enabling customers to reduce the need for public road driving tests.

Test data processing and durability analysis

nCode GlyphWorks is a data processing system that contains a powerful set of pre-defined tools for performing durability analysis and other insightful tasks such as digital signal processing. Designed to handle huge amounts of data, GlyphWorks provides a graphical, process-oriented environment that contains leading analysis capabilities for saving both time and money in environmental qualification and product validation.

CAE-based fatigue analysis

nCode DesignLife is an up-front design tool that identifies critical locations and calculates realistic fatigue lives from leading finite element (FE) results for both metals and composites. Design engineers can go beyond performing simplified stress analysis and avoid under- or over-designing products by simulating actual loading conditions to avoid costly design changes.