Geislinger’s Thalhammer on powertrain reliability

Dr. Andreas Thalhammer, Manager TVC & Digital Development at Geislinger, will be speaking on the topic of “Powertrain Innovation – Development Speed vs. Reliability?”

Andreas Thalhammer

Thursday, June 15, 13:40-15:20, OMT (R101-103)

Here’s a synopsis of his presentation:

Engine builders and powertrain designers face an increasing need to innovate in many different areas: due to the use of various future fuels, the more stringent emission regulations, and the need for low-noise solutions – just to name a few of many different influences. Time-to-market is critical, as users and operators ask for solutions to be available in the near future – which means that also the development speed needs to be increased. Additionally, the permanent optimization of the powertrains and the broadened application areas increase the complexity to integrate new components and meet the various requirements defined.

But how can we combine new technologies and increased development speed with the industry’s request for highest reliability of the single components and the whole installation? Extensive in-house and field tests in different applications and for many years are certainly not suitable.

This paper describes strategies and tools which are used to design, integrate, and validate new technologies and new products for future engine and powertrain concepts at shortest development times and with highest reliability. The process is demonstrated by a gear-integrated elastic coupling, designed for the reduction of mechanical engine noise.

This design and validation process incorporates the use of multi-dimensional simulation approaches, a closed-loop product layout strategy and a load-matrix approach for efficient testing and validation of the whole installation or critical sub-systems.

Due to the complexity of installations, load profiles and operating conditions in our industry, the knowledge of these boundary conditions is the key for feeding the above-mentioned strategies and algorithms with the right input data. Therefore, the strategy as described above is supported by measurement and monitoring data, which is feed back into the design and validation process to consider the operational loads during the application in use. This provides a closed loop development process that enables to place optimized solutions that improve the global powertrain system.