1:55 PMhe BMW Group prides themselves on creating individualized driving experiences, from the high-performance luxury of a BMW and the opulence of a Rolls-Royce to the free-spirited MINI. Apart from premium performance, a focus on interior refinement has inspired salient features — Swarovski crystal shift knobs, starry-sky projections in the headliner, and digitally projected art displays on the dash.
Introducing features like these into an already busy interior environment can be challenging. The light from backlit buttons, infotainment and instrumentation displays, plus the glare from the sun or oncoming headlamps at night are all competing to the point of distraction. Leveraging Ansys simulation software running on an NVIDIA GPU-accelerated computing platform enables the BMW Group to address unwanted reflections and glare, thereby ensuring a comfortable driving environment.
Kenneth Weselake, virtual validation project leader at the BMW Group, uses Ansys Speos CAD-integrated optical and lighting simulation software early on to do light studies to optimize optical interior elements for the BMW, Rolls-Royce, and MINI brands. He says, “We are cleverly using light as an information carrier, creating entertaining animations, implementing hidden projectors allowing the digital world of the displays to overflow out onto the dash, thus connecting the digital and physical worlds. We are merging light, materials, and controls. We have light streaming through materials and multiple displays reflecting in the front windshield, which we have branded BMW Panoramic Vision”.
All these elements are guided by the light properties of a range of material and color choices. And all must be ranked and evaluated for various elements of the dash to determine what can be possible with safety in mind. A big challenge is how to allow lighter colored interiors without disturbing the driver. Branding had to be carefully considered, along with all the materials involved in creating dash components, as well as the use of textures to reduce reflections. Weselake successfully used Speos to experiment with color gradients, dash geometries, and materials to minimize unwanted reflections and glare.
“I’ve measured over a thousand different materials”, he says. “This is necessary to perform comparison studies. I’m using Speos software to gauge the color intensities. Referring to my cockpit setup, I can update my dash model in Speos software again with all the different materials to see the influence the geometry, as well as the materials, has on the results. Early on in the design process, I’m still able to have an influence on the geometry. Later on in the design process, it’s mainly materials”.
Leveraging Speos and Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Generation GPUs enabled Weselake to run optical simulations 300 times faster. Breaking this down further, the setup gave a significant boost to Speos performance, reducing individual test runs from several hours to under 10 minutes.
