Leuven, Belgium - LMS, the engineering innovation company, announced the Introduction of LMS Virtual.Lab Motion Rev 7 for vehicle ride and handling. LMS Virtual.Lab Motion offers dedicated solutions to simulate the ride and handling behavior of vehicles from passenger cars, to motor sports vehicles and up to commercial vehicles such as trucks and buses. With Rev 7, LMS Virtual.Lab Motion gains important new capabilities to simulate vehicle and driver interaction, to accelerate the creation of full-vehicle models and to smoothen the exchange of these models with other departments. Developed in cooperation with leading NASCAR series racing teams, LMS Virtual.Lab Motion Rev 7 also features a dedicated simulation solution for professional racing teams.

To further step up the accuracy and reliability of vehicle handling and ride-comfort simulation, LMS Virtual.Lab Motion incorporates the complex interaction between driver and vehicle. LMS integrated the industry-standard driver model developed by IPG Automotive in Germany, which adds actions and re-actions of a human driver to the dynamic model of a vehicle. By calculating vehicle model inputs that result from human actions including gas, brake or clutch operation, gear shift and steering, IPG-DRIVER is able to realistically model different driving styles, from defensive to aggressive. Through the integration of IPG-DRIVER in LMS Virtual.lab Motion, ride and handling engineers can simulate all chassis, driveline and control system parameters (ESP, ABS, etc.), and tune and validate them early in the design process. This was previously only feasible with physical prototypes and human drivers.


LMS Virtual.Lab Motion Rev 7 introduces new tools to drastically accelerate the vehicle modeling process and to make it error-free. The software offers predefined and parameterized suspension designs, including double A-arm, McPherson, multilink and quadralink setups. In addition, Rev 7 offers dedicated parametrized models for subsystems like steering, braking and driveline systems, for which it automatically integrates all relevant points, parts and connections into the vehicle model. LMS Virtual.Lab Motion Rev 7 also features an extensive library of predefined vehicle events that include both open-loop and closed-loop vehicle maneuvers, such as slow ramp steer, ISO lane change and constant radius/speed cornering. Besides the availability of a long list of pre-defined vehicle events, the flexibility is offered to specify any kind of user-definable event. To efficiently validate the suspension design, LMS Virtual.Lab automatically generates suspension-related graphs, which include Ackerman error charts, anti dive/lift graphs and dependent suspension plots.

To guarantee consistent model data across vehicle performance attributes, the new MBS-to-FEA model conversion supports the synchronization of multibody simulation models used for ride and handling and finite-element models developed in NVH departments. Multibody models are solved as time-domain results, but converting them to NVH models allows the data to be used for frequency-domain results as well. The smooth MBS-to-FEA model conversion enable development teams to secure consistent model data across different attributes throughout the detailed engineering process.