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The development of entire car bodies benefits from simulations, especially if they are performed at an early stage of development. Simulations lower the costs for required car body modifications. This paper focuses on dip painting simulation and describes the simulation process by detecting badly painted areas and liquid carry overs. A new hydrodynamic method has been benchmarked to CFD and real-life results. Results will be shown together with case examples. The solver is similar to, and as accurate as, standard CFD solvers; it is faster in its computation speed by a factor of at least 1000. The electrophoretic deposition (ELPO) of an entire car body can be simulated overnight with ALSIM. How is this possible? This paper points out the reason for all of this.

The manual or semi-automatic preparation of triangular and tetrahedral meshes for simulations is a very time-consuming task. The mesh preprocessing software MERGE however masters this task fully automatically and in a considerably shorter timeframe. It takes CAD or STL data as input, repairs invalid meshes and connects them together. The small gaps between the input objects are automatically closed and even glancing intersections can be cut off. The output can be supplied in different variations, either as a mesh that minimizes the number of elements, as a mesh consisting of high-quality surface triangles, or as a conforming tetrahedral mesh, while all of these possibilities are suitable for CFD or CAE simulations. Connecting the meshes of an entire car body can be done in (as little as) a few hours and does not require any manual work.

The development of entire car bodies benefits from simulations, especially if they are performed at an early stage of development because they lower the costs for required car body modifications. This paper focuses on a dip paint simulation and describes the simulation process as an e-coat (electric coating) thickness simulation which considers gas bubbles, drainage and buoyancy forces. This paper points out the advantages of this technology by explaining the theory behind this. A new hydrodynamic method is used which performs about 1000 times faster as standard computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solvers. In addition, this method allows executing the computation on standard desktop machines, i.e. no high performance computer (HPC) is needed. In addition we introduce a simple method to calculate the static buoyancy forces of arbitrary homogeneous objects and a simple model movement of an engine hood induced by buoyancy and drag forces.

Simulations need high quality mesh representations as input which are often manually prepared. The fully automatic mesh preprocessor software MERGE avoids this time consuming task. The software CAD or STL data as input, repairs invalid meshes and merges the input objects together. Small gaps between the input objects are automatically closed. The output surface mesh can be supplied in two different flavors, either as a mesh that minimizes the number of elements or as a mesh consisting of high quality triangles, ready for 3D meshing. A closed and connected surface mesh of an entire car body can be prepared overnight in a fully automatic manner.