SummaryNew times bring innovation, but also new demands. There is a need to achieve realistic and predictive results more efficiently than ever. Test teams are increasingly working closely with simulation teams using a comprehen-sive digital twin to combine component data and develop a hybrid predictive prototype in the early stages of devel-opment. At the same time, it is critical to obtain the most information possible from massive amounts of data collected by testing and generated by simulation.

The development processes based on a verification-centric engineering approach are in transition. Teams across indus-tries are exploring and adopting new predictive methods with the aim of establishing a better process for early performance prediction, supporting sys-tems-driven product development. This emerging industry paradigm, which involves developing a comprehensive digital twin of a product, enables devel-opment teams to deliver innovations faster and with greater confidence.

Consequently, test-based engineering not only plays an essential role in the fully assembled system prototype vali-dation and certification stages, but it is

also growing in importance in much earlier development stages. At the same time, introducing an increasing number of product variants while reducing the number of physical prototypes increases the test teams’ workload and time con-straints, and demands accurate and reli-able data collection using unified test campaigns that cover multiple perfor-mance attributes at once.

Simcenter™ Testlab™ software 2021.1 has been specifically designed to offer test and simulation teams new capabili-ties to collaboratively innovate smart products more productively while man-aging tight schedules. It covers every step of a typical test campaign, from instrumentation, monitoring and data collection to validation, analysis, verifi-cation of performance requirements and reporting. Our end-to-end testing solution helps you streamline your entire testing process in any stage of product development.

What’s new in Simcenter Testlab 2021.1Simcenter Testlab 2021.1, which is part of the Xcelerator™ portfolio, the com-prehensive and integrated portfolio of software and services from Siemens Digital Industries Software, offers new capabilities and functionalities through-out the application portfolio.

Simcenter Testlab Neo is further expanded with new data management and reporting concepts, and new func-tional extensions enrich the acoustics and durability and model-based system testing solutions.

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Benefits• Realize new levels of testing

productivity with process and technology innovation

• Reduce training requirements by ensuring ease-of-use for novices as well as experts

• Achieve more engineering insight with multidisciplinary analysis and close integration of test and simulation

• Validate and tune simulation models faster and more effectively with integrated execution and simulation data processing with model-based system testing

• Accelerate structural dynamics testing with digital image correlation, a new technique for measuring full-field 3D displace-ments, strains and vibrations

• Front-load full vehicle NVH analysis with component-based TPA, applying improved component characterization methods and predictive NVH synthesis for virtual prototype assemblies

What’s new in Simcenter Testlab 2021.1

Achieving increased levels of testing productivity by leveraging process and technology innovation

What’s new in Simcenter Testlab 2021.1

• Create fit-for-purpose templates according to company-specific acqui-sition or processing procedures

As a user, you may need to easily exchange your findings with colleagues, customers or suppliers. The Simcenter Testlab report, which has been intro-duced in this new version, is a multi-pic-ture document that can be saved as a .report file and can easily be shared. The data for the curves in displays can be preselected or retrieved by embed-ded queries. Once the report is shared and opened by colleagues, customer or suppliers, the displays are filled with the correct curves based on the queries or absolute links to the data. The query concept as used in the reports also facil-itates adding, removing or replacing data in the displays during the regular testing and analysis jobs, simplifying data validation and comparison of results across various tests. New types of displays have been added, such a polar and orbit plots for rotor dynamics and satellite map displays to document public road or track testing.

With the new release, the Simcenter Testlab instrumentation app interacts with the Simcenter Testlab Neo data acquisition applications. This helps users to define the channel setup in a fast and effective manner by using a tablet application. While defining chan-nel properties with the app near the item under test, all settings and changes are immediately reflected in the Simcenter Testlab channel setup. In addition, the new version of the app

extends the functionalities related to picture management. Using the camera of the tablet, the test engineer can take pictures of the complete physical setup or of individual sensors. These pictures are visible in the app and can be imme-diately transferred to Simcenter Testlab. The pictures are then accessible directly within Simcenter Testlab and are stored in the Simcenter Testlab project.

One of the trends in product design and development is the increasing number of design variants that are offered to consumers. This trend puts pressure on the consistency of the noise, vibration and harshness (NVH) performance across the variants. The sound quality engineers on development and valida-tion teams therefore must deliver test results faster and in a more efficient way. Regardless of their level of exper-tise, engineers need tools that help them achieve better results faster while enabling them to maintain the same level of quality and confidence in their analyses and methods. The sound qual-ity engineering capabilities of Simcenter Testlab software are designed to meet

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New technologies such as digital image correlation (DIC) are introduced in Simcenter Testlab core applications, along with extending component-based transfer path analysis (TPA) and multi-ple enhancements in acoustics and environmental testing applications.

Simcenter Testlab NeoSimcenter Testlab Neo is a leading soft-ware platform for multidisciplinary test-based performance engineering. It integrates years of engineering experi-ence into a new environment that offers greater productivity, more insights, increased confidence and eas-ier collaboration. The new task-driven user experience facilitates work produc-tivity and overall navigability. A fully customizable and flexible process designer speeds up analysis, supports multidisciplinary analytics and embeds simulation models as part of any pro-cess flow. Selectable display panels as well as intuitive and interactive graphs accelerate results interpretation. Simcenter Testlab Neo is straightfor-ward to use, increases testing produc-tivity, fosters team collaboration and nurtures engineering passion.

Using Simcenter Testlab Neo Desktop enables our users to easily evaluate, analyze, report and share test and simu-lation results, maximizing efficiency and providing engineering insights, even when needing to handle large volumes of data.

Simcenter Testlab Desktop Neo provides capabilities to:

• Instantly organize and visualize large volumes of data

• Efficiently and interactively diagnose your data using display-embedded data analytics

• Conveniently compare and share fully annotated results within and across different departments

• Efficiently validate and correlate test and simulation data

these requirements. Key functionalities for advanced audio replay and sound quality analysis have been added in Simcenter Testlab 2021.1.

The new interactive segment analysis and interactive scope displays enhance the effectiveness of analysis with audio replay.

New methods are available in Simcenter Process Designer, such as averaging over multiple runs, and the ECMA-74 based Hearing Model Tonality. The cal-culate method has been modified to accept statistics (or single values) as input. One of the popular scenarios is the process of implementing preference equations (also known as golden met-rics). These metrics are typically created by correlating results of subjective jury tests (or listening tests) with objective results coming from sound quality met-ric analysis, such as loudness, promi-nence ratio and articulation index. The preference equation is a numerical

combination of these metrics that rep-resents the judgment of the jurors.

Also, new methods for durability pro-cessing are available in Simcenter Testlab 2021.1 Process Designer, such as the calculation of shock response spectra (SRS), new peak count methods, trackside validation capabilities and combined methods, supporting typical calculations such as bolt stress or criti-cal plane.

In addition, multiple new methods are part of Simcenter Testlab 2021.1 Process Designer for dedicated rotating machinery analysis. This includes syn-chronous resampling from time to angle, synchronous order maps, aver-aged order spectra, phase referenced spectrum maps and averaged spectra, including a variety of triggering capabil-ities when building these maps and averages.

The current trend in NVH testing is mov-ing away from having multiple test

teams, testing driving scenarios with dif-ferent instrumentations.

The target becomes a common multi-attribute testing session in which the resulting time traces need to be smartly split and processed.

Simcenter Testlab 2021.1 supports this by making use of smart splitters like GPS coordinates to identify a track, use of a keystroke event or advanced triggering. Simcenter Testlab Neo covers multiple scenarios in which time traces can be processed using different settings for multiple segments all at once.

Simcenter Testlab 2021.1 Process Designer also features more generic new capabilities: intermediate processing results can now be used to annotate data, for example, with new X-axis values.

Model-based system testingTo cope with market demand for energy efficiency, active safety systems, mass customization and high performance, new generations of products are ever more mechatronic. The increased num-ber of product variants challenges manu-facturers to rethink and reshape the conventional development model and drive the transition to a model-based development process. Instead of using engineering approaches with separate workflows for test and simulation lack-ing flexibility and efficiency, model-based system testing (MBST) fuses these fundamentally different worlds and offers solutions to connect them and thus accelerate the different product development stages.

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Simcenter Amesim™ software data can be accessed via the Amesim Sketch Viewer in the Simcenter Testlab Neo Desktop and in Simcenter Testlab Process Designer. This offers a model-driven way to select Simcenter Amesim simulation results. This model-driven data selection closes the loop with sim-ulation in a unique way. It makes the model-validation process easier for the test engineer and enables the simula-tion engineer to access the flexible pro-cessing and powerful engineering displays offered by Simcenter Testlab Neo. With the 2021.1 release, this inte-gration is further expanded with unit mapping, handling of non-equidistant simulation results and easier access to simulation variables.

The Simcenter Testlab Process Designer supports the Functional Mock-up Interface (FMI) standard. With the 2021.1 release, multiple Functional Mock-up Units (FMUs) can be included in a single process chain. A series of usability improvements have been made, supporting a convenient setup of the FMU method within Simcenter Process Designer. This includes auto-matic recognition of the FMU output units when available and automatic adaption of the simulation time to the length of the input data as generated in the process. Each FMU contains a

simulation model and its integration into Simcenter Process Designer enables the direct coupling of test data with simulation models. The calculated simu-lation results can then be used as input to other methods that are connected to this FMU method. For example, the in-process simulation of Simcenter Testlab Process Designer enables the immediate calculation of performance metrics on the full system while testing a single component on a test bench. The FMU also enables the calculation of so-called model-based virtual sensors, which pro-vide additional engineering insights during testing. Using the FMU method is an efficient way to update model

parameters immediately at the test bench. The FMI standard is supported by multiple vendors of simulation solutions.

Digital image correlationCharacterizing the structural behavior of materials and structures under load is a key enabler to improve designs and develop high-performance products. Standard measurement techniques, nor-mally employing strain gauges for these applications, only provide limited and local information. The fast development of digital camera technology in combi-nation with high-performant DIC tech-niques is currently bringing a radical change to this domain. Thanks to DIC, it is now possible to extract full-field 3D geometry, displacement and strain information under any load and for almost any type of material, with lim-ited instrumentation. These data can then be used to identify material prop-erties, validating numerical models and assessing the strength of materials and components without the risk of over-looking key local phenomena. This method is also applicable to analyze structural vibrations and dynamic responses and can be used to character-ize rotating and lightweight structures that would otherwise be extremely dif-ficult to test with standard techniques. The Simcenter Testlab 2021.1 Structural Dynamics Testing family includes a new

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solution for image data acquisition and DIC. It allows you to extract full-field displacement and strain fields from digi-tal images of structures under any kind of loading. The solution is completed with several toolboxes, which enable identifying material properties from the measured data as well as seamlessly comparing full-field experimental data with simulation results.

Impact testingSimcenter Testlab 2021.1 Impact Post Processing is a new workbook that offers dedicated functionalities to

calculate frequency response functions (FRF) and the associated functions from time data recorded during an impact test in a delayed mode while still retain-ing all the interactivity and functional-ities the Simcenter Testlab Impact Testing workbook offers, such as the spectral settings, triggers and windows.

The workbook supports the user in pro-cessing both throughput data as well as time waterfall data. A table listing all impacts facilitates quickly including or excluding them from the FRF calculation. All changes are automatically applied to

the data so the user can instantaneously see the effects on the FRFs and coher-ences. Dedicated quality indicators are also available to support the user in the selection of the best impacts that maxi-mize the FRF quality.

Environmental testingThe Simcenter Testlab environmental solutions to cover multiple-input config-urations for vibration qualification test-ing is further expanding. In parallel, the capabilities of the acoustic qualification testing have increased. Simcenter Testlab 2021.1 MIMO Random Control is the recommended software for the new direct field acoustic excitation (DFAX).

The 2021.1 release offers new methods to define control settings that are most appropriate for the case at hand. Simcenter Testlab 2021.1 MIMO Random Control provides new methods to define the multiple input, multiple output (MIMO) target or test refer-ences. This includes the introduction of power spectral density (PSD) and acous-tic modes. The objective is to reduce the complexity of defining the control matrix for the user by automating calculations.

In addition, Simcenter Testlab 2021.1 introduces a pretest analysis in the sys-tem verification stage, which predicts responses resulting from a given control parameter setting before the actual tests.

Simcenter Testlab 2021.1 Acoustic Control for reverberant chambers pro-vides a control algorithm that automati-cally designs and updates the signals sent to the acoustic sources to safely reach the sound pressure level test specification. This solution has been proven in several acoustic facilities around the world and is ideally con-nected to a data acquisition (or data reduction) system for online processing of hundreds of channels and recording/monitoring vibration data.

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With Simcenter Testlab 2021.1, the limiting on derived channels – such as calculated forces and moments – is extended from the sine to random applications. This provides for a simpler and more robust solution than the tradi-tional approach, using additional pro-grammable hardware to calculate, acquire and use force signals for controls.

New capabilities in acoustics testingTo create a more harmonious living environment and reduce the risks of noise exposure, legislators worldwide are imposing limits on pass-by noise (PBN) levels. International Organization for Standardization (ISO) certification requirements are used to make sure vehicles comply with established legis-lation. This type of certification is required for all types of road vehicles, including trucks, buses, motorcycles, passenger cars and recreational vehicles.

On the other hand, the absence of high levels of exterior noise in hybrid and electrical vehicles, especially at low speeds, has a negative impact on pedes-trian safety. Therefore, new standards are put in place for measuring minimum noise emission. For these vehicles an acoustic vehicle alert system (AVAS) adds exterior noise to ensure pedestrian safety. Simcenter testing solutions pro-vide modular hardware for reliable data acquisition combined with comprehen-sive pass-by noise engineering soft-ware, enhancing accuracy and efficiency. In addition, the solution delivers engineering insight well beyond the certification procedures; for instance, by pinpointing root causes of dominant noise contributors. Simcenter Testlab 2021.1 extends these capabili-ties by supporting the latest procedures according to recent international regu-lations and standards for pass-by-noise and AVAS.

The quiet operation of electrified vehi-cles opens opportunities for creating distinctive driving experiences by add-ing new sounds reflecting the brand

identity. Simcenter Testlab Sound Designer software enables you to create a unique signature to add to the origi-nal sound and is an excellent tool both for exterior and interior acoustic engi-neering. With Simcenter Testlab 2021.1, the synthesis methods library is ex- panded with frequency modulation (FM) synthesis. This method uses fre-quency modulation of a predefined or custom waveform that can be selected from a drop-down table. With the new release one can directly use the live data stream format (LDSF) recorded with the Simcenter SCADAS™ XS hard-ware and binaural headset as a drive profile. The LDSF contains the dynamic vehicle parameters (speed, revolutions per minute, torque, throttle) and the binaural recording of the sound. The granular synthesis methods are expanded with new features, providing far more flexibility and customization in terms of the number of grains and type of window waveforms.

In Simcenter Testlab 2021.1, the sound source localization solution features an enhanced Bayesian Focusing implemen-tation. This quantitative method signifi-cantly improves spatial resolution, especially in low frequencies. Its main benefits compared to existing methods are its flexibility to measurement dis-tance when compared to standard near-field acoustic holography methods, and

its capability to reconstruct correlated sources compared to deconvolution methods.

Simcenter Testlab 2021.1 supports the combined used of a Simcenter SCADAS Mobile and a Simcenter Sound Camera™ software Digital Array in front-end configuration. Such measure-ment provides immediate correlation between sensors used in generic NVH measurements and the sound source location results.

Transfer path analysisAutomotive original equipment manu-facturers (OEMs) must reduce full vehi-cle testing in late prototype stages to handle the wide variety of vehicle vari-ants. They still need to ensure NVH per-formance while keeping development time and cost under control. Target set-ting at component and subsystem level and collaboration between suppliers and OEMs is key in achieving these targets.

Simcenter Testlab Virtual Prototype Assembly (VPA) software enables the evaluation of the vehicle performance in early design stages. It maximizes the use of all available information on sub-systems and components, whether it be measurement data or simulation results. Simcenter Testlab 2021.1 pro-vides a unique and comprehensive set

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of solutions to measure, postprocess and publish accurate and consistent component models using Simcenter Testlab Component-based TPA.

Often certain interface points are diffi-cult to access for FRF measurements, representing the dynamic stiffness at the connection. The Simcenter Testlab Virtual Point Transformation add-in (also known as geometric reduction) is used to derive the FRF at the exact cou-pling points location – including transla-tional and rotational degrees of freedom – from a set of FRFs measured around these interface points.

Once the data that represents a mea-sured component is verified by the author, the Simcenter Testlab NVH Component Definition add-in is used to define and store a component model, including an extensive description of the type of component and its interface ports. The component model can describe structural dynamics and struc-tural and/or airborne loads.

This description then allows the Simcenter Testlab Virtual Prototype Assembly processing engine to easily identify and process the component into a virtual assembly. NVH perfor-mance prediction and sub-system target cascading can then be performed on the assembly.

Standardizing on this approach results in a more effective target setting pro-cess and strengthens the collaboration between teams throughout the supply chain.

Component models originating from numerical simulation teams can be picked up and handled in the same con-sistent way as test data.

The Simcenter Testlab 2021.1 matrix-heatmap display is extended to cope with functions with incompatible quan-tities. When multiple quantities are present in data set, a normalization of the data is done per quantity to guaran-tee proper interpretability of the data.

The premium solution for test-based engineeringIn the digital era it remains crucial to test, validate and optimize real-world designs within the constraints of shorter testing cycles, conflicting performance requirements, growing product com-plexity and reduced costs. Simcenter testing solutions integrate multi-physics data acquisition hardware with a com-plete suite of acquisition, analytics and modeling software to cover a wide range of test needs.

With an impressive range of new func-tionalities, Simcenter Testlab 2021.1 provides additional capabilities to inno-vate smart products and deliver critical

insights faster – an evolution that helps the value of past investments continue to grow.

It enables engineers to make better decisions quicker by increasing produc-tivity in testing scenarios. It delivers more and better insights by allowing users to investigate issues from differ-ent angles using the same toolset, and by benefiting from the additional under-standing simulation models can bring. It further increases user confidence in their data, minimizing instrumentation errors and making sure they can build on the data measured with the objec-tive to better support the role of simula-tion in the development process and maximize the benefits of using the com-prehensive digital twin concepts. It also facilitates collaboration between teams and thus smooths the entire engineer-ing process. The Simcenter Testlab port-folio enables unique ways to access data of other Simcenter product family members. Its ease-of-use makes the novice user quickly operational while new powerful features make the expert ever more efficient.

Ultimately, Simcenter Testlab 2021.1 has been specifically designed to offer test and simulation teams new capabili-ties to innovate smart products more productively while working on tight schedules.

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