In today's automotive climate, the tendency of an increasing number of vehicle model variants offered is coming to a head with the growing demands for safer vehicles. New legislation now ensures that the safety improvement by the fitment of stability control systems is certified for each new vehicle. Beginning year 2012, all new cars to be sold in the European Union have to be equipped with ESC, and as means to test performance, a new supplement to ECE R13 requires that the Sine-with-Dwell test be passed.
As a result, OEMs have to handle the task of demonstrating that all their vehicles meet homologation requirements. With such a range of variants possible in each model, this can lead to an enormous quantity of testing. However, for the first time, ECE R13 allows homologation to be undertaken by test-supported simulation, and it is now possible to transfer more and more of this work into CAE.
This paper describes the results of a project executed at General Motors Europe (GME) in cooperation with Applus IDIADA to prove, document and ensure that it is possible to simulate the Sine-with-Dwell test as the base for ESC certification. Based on extensive static and dynamic tests the validity of a vehicle model together with a brake controller and hydraulic model are demonstrated. With several steps of model correlation it is ensured that all model components are understood in detail, so that it is possible to vary model parameters maintaining the validity. Thus, it is possible to cover the complete range of vehicle variants.
