Vehicle Water Management: 6 Must-Have Simulation Techniques
Learn how to ensure your cars perform in wet conditions—before hitting the test track.
Heavy rain, snow squalls, and flooding—these are just a few of the water-related challenges automakers must navigate. With the rise of electrified and autonomous vehicles, the stakes are even higher. These new technologies bring unique challenges, including sensitive sensors, lightweight components, and complex electrical systems, making accurate predictions of vehicle behavior even more critical. Will lightweight parts rupture when driving through a large puddle? Can sensors maintain their accuracy in harsh conditions? Small water-related defects can have a significant impact on vehicle performance and safety, risking certification like NCAP and compliance with global regulations.
To meet stringent regulations like ISO 10542 for environmental testing of road vehicles, automakers rely on expensive and limited climate chambers to simulate extreme environmental conditions - high humidity, temperature cycles, water resistance (splash, flooding, sloshing), and dust penetration - costing upwards of $100,000 per test. As the industry faces tighter release cycles and budgets, virtual testing is emerging as a game-changer. It allows manufacturers to gain critical insights earlier in the design process, ensuring vehicles meet certification requirements without costly retests.
Read this blog to discover how virtual simulation with VPS can help you solve your water management testing challenges
Ensure Successful Test Bench Results with Early Vehicle Water Management Simulation
Virtual in-operation try-outs enable unlimited simulated tests, allowing automotive manufacturers to investigate and predict vehicle behavior in all water-related scenarios as part of the development process. This provides vital insight at the start of the design phase so that systems and components can be adjusted along with reducing the dependency on physical test track studies, ensuring that to enhance perceived quality, increase customer satisfaction, and prevent recalls.
Wet conditions and water splash can significantly damage car plastic parts, and countermeasures are difficult to design using physical testing: the failure root case is hard to interpret, and physical tests cannot be repeated until a satisfactory design is found for a majority of scenarios. In addition, electric and hybrid vehicles contain sensitive components like power electronics that require protection from water intrusion.
Water can also produce a host of driving hazards—among them hydroplaning, reduced traction, limited visibility, and increased stopping distance. These all pose a safety threat to the vehicle’s occupants, other drivers, passengers, and pedestrians.
The goal is to accurately simulate the interaction of water with the car structure, ensuring the vehicle’s response to water aligns with the stringent demands of real-world tests, ultimately enabling the automaker to achieve certification and type approval.
Limitless Testing of Water Crossing with Keysight’s Virtual Performance Solution
Keysight’s Virtual Performance Solution (VPS) provides advanced capabilities for end-to-end vehicle water management simulation. The software utilizes the meshless, scalable Finite Pointset Method (FPM) to model fluid- structure interactions.
VPS enables engineers to simulate full vehicle water crossing scenarios, including deformable tires and suspensions, in just one single simulation tool. This comprehensive analysis reveals how wet conditions affect the entire car structure, delivering insights such as:
- Where are potential design weak points where water could encroach?
- Where should vehicle structure, aerodynamics, and sealing be optimized to improve water crossing durability?
- How do critical systems and components withstand water exposure?
This helps engineers optimize vehicle design, component placement, and water management considerations early in the development phase to ensure performance, reliability and safety in wet conditions.
What is a Vehicle Water Management System? It's All About Accurately Simulating Realistic Driving Operations With Virtual Car Prototypes
These are the 6 Must-Have Simulation Techniques that empower you to ride the waves with your new car design and why you should hop on Virtual Performance Simulation Software (VPS) for Vehicle Water Management Simulation:
1. Predicting Water Intrusion
As extreme weather events become increasingly frequent, it is crucial for vehicles to withstand heavy snow, rainstorms and flooding. VPS simulates flood conditions and deep-water crossings to assess water intrusion risks in essential components like the engine, battery, air filters, and other critical areas. It also offers valuable insights into design improvements to enhance durability and resilience.
2. Corrosion and Durability Testing
VPS simulates how exposure to shallow water splash during regular driving conditions can affect a vehicle's durability. For instance, in winter, splashes of salted water may strike unprotected parts, leading to corrosion. Additionally, cold sprays coming into contact with hot components can cause thermal and mechanical stress, resulting in potential part failure over time.
3. Predicting Water Splash
Accurately forecasting water splash requires more than a basic fluid simulation. The process must account for tire and suspension deformation alongside fluid dynamics. Key elements such as the tire footprint and suspension effects must be dynamically modeled, as tires compress and deform under the car's weight and road irregularities.
This combined interaction of suspension and tire deformation drives the water splash kinematics, while internal tire pressure fluctuates due to these changes. Realistic, physics-based simulations can be achieved using Virtual Performance Solution (VPS), which incorporates fluid-structure interaction within a unified model.
4. Analyzing Hydroplaning
By simulating the tire footprint under factors such as car speed, water depth, and tire deformation, VPS pinpoints critical moments when hydroplaning is likely to occur.
5. Assessing Rainwater Drainage
VPS can evaluate the functionality of the water box, a crucial component responsible for collecting and draining rainwater from the windshield. The system ensures that water is efficiently directed through the outflow, avoiding sensitive areas like the air intake. By simulating various driving conditions and rainwater scenarios, VPS enables engineers to test and optimize water box designs, ensuring effective water management and preventing water intrusion into critical components such as the air filter.
6. Simulating Water Flow for Car Closures
VPS allows car closure designers to simulate water flow during and after rainfall. It accurately predicts water accumulation in various areas of the vehicle and how it may enter when doors or hatchbacks are opened. This enables engineers to identify and address potential leakage issues in critical areas, such as luggage compartments or near electrical components. By preventing water intrusion into the cabin and reducing the risk of electrical short circuits, VPS helps enhance customer satisfaction and improve overall quality perception.
How Can You Confidently Mange the Transition from Design to Test Bench Accuracy?
As innovation in the automotive industry continues, the VPS software is a critical tool for cost savings and accelerating time to market while simultaneously ensuring performance and durability. Quickly understanding the impact of wet conditions is particularly important for EV and autonomous vehicles, as these cars have more sensors and charging infrastructure that water could damage.
By delivering these insights and pinpointing problem areas much earlier in the development process than traditional testing methods, vehicle water management simulation accelerates design and development cycles, enabling manufacturers to make informed decisions earlier, and to bring safer, more reliable vehicles to the market faster and more efficiently.
Take a moment and think about what the numerical response of your existing water management simulation approach is to your daily work challenges:
- Can you effectively control car trajectory under flooding or heavy rain conditions?
- Can you determine which strategies to implement to prevent water from entering critical parts in hybrid and electric vehicles?
- Can you be sure that water does not reach the air intake of combustion engine vehicles or HVAC system?
- Can you ensure the structural durability of lightweight components, especially plastic ones, against water impact?
- Can you prevent issues like corrosion, fatigue, or thermal shock loadings when cold water contacts hot parts, such as exhaust components?
- Can you evaluate water crossing, external water intrusion, and liquid sloshing in tanks, providing comprehensive predictive evaluations for vehicle structure deformation, barrier effectiveness, and tank integrity?
If only one box is checked with no, it’s really time to shift to VPS for evaluating vehicle performance, safety, and strength in real-world driving conditions!
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