Renault Uses ESI's PAM-COMFORT Solution to Virtually Design a New Car Seat

By DE Editors

ESI Group announced the successful completion of Renault’s first “fully virtual” preliminary design of a new seat using PAM-COMFORT, ESI’s solution for virtual seat prototyping. 

ESI’s PAM-COMFORT software offers a scalable, customized solution dedicated to virtual manufacturing and virtual testing of the soft parts of a seat. Virtual seat prototyping consists of several chained simulated steps ranging from seat manufacturing and occupant static seating, to occupied seat noise, vibration and harshness testing. The chaining is a necessary requirement to accurately predict the behavior of the seats under numerous loading conditions (trimming, dummy loading, various human anthropometries, and vibrations) and for various design changes (materials and shape). 

At Renault, where the full virtual seat prototyping methodology is being deployed, one important step after the preliminary design of a new seat model is the virtual testing of the dynamic comfort performance using PAM-COMFORT. In order to accurately predict seat comfort, Renault runs a dynamic test of seat transmissibility with a static weight. The test helps evaluate the seat frequency response and thus informs Renault about how the seat contributes to the vertical acceleration filtering of the car, which is of first importance to dynamic seat comfort. This test is used improve and validate the seat design.  

Renault simulated this test procedure with a finite element calculation using PAM-COMFORT.  After completing the seat manufacturing simulations, a dummy is imported in the model to launch the computation. This calculation is divided in two phases: first, a static phase where the dummy is seated and where the equilibrium is computed to precisely know the stress and strain states of the various parts of the seat; second, a dynamic phase where a vertical acceleration signal is applied to the seat rail to obtain the seat dynamic transmissibility at the interface with the dummy.  
For more information, visit ESI.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company's website.