This year’s conference was entitled “10 years of virtual car body painting at CADFEM” and underlines the strong commitment of CADFEM and its customers towards the virtual process simulation of painting processes in the automotive industry.

A welcome address by Karl-Michael Gitschier, Head of Surface Technology and Production Planning Department at BMW Group and Günter Müller, President of CADFEM GmbH, was given to the attendees. Mr. Gitschier has underlined need and progress in virtual car body painting at the BMW Group in the last 10 years. This message was proven by the presentation of a movie and speech of Josef Huber from BMW on the use of simulation in car body painting at BMW. This professional movie and presentation already got the best paper award at the SURCAR 2007 in Cannes this year. Mr. Huber’s paper focussed on the broad implementation of simulation in car body painting at BMW and on the arguments which drive BMW towards a virtual chain in car body painting.

Klemens Rother from CADFEM was giving an overview about the progress in the past 10 years. 8 software modules of VPS have been developed. Many difficulties have been managed. The resulting solution today offers a full package and functional solution fitting to the needs of the automotive industry. In a second presentation Mr. Rother has given an outlook into the future. More functionality towards frontloading, closing gaps in simulation modules, coupling simulation modules and automation have been key aspects for CADFEMs vision into the future. Skills, tools and knowledge of CADFEM in many different areas, like numerical analysis, software development, knowledge based engineering, multiscale analysis and many more are the necessary basis to achieve those ambitious goals. CADFEM is well prepared to achieve many of the new ideas.

Prof. Joachim Domnick from the University of Applied Sciences, Esslingen - expert in simulation of coating processes - focussed on different requirements for simulation tools. He also mentioned the conflicts of high demands in physical modelling and available budgets for getting answers in the car body development. He asks for a common platform including different simulation disciplines under a single environment.

Alex Lakic and Simon Maher from Jaguar & Land Rover have given a detailed view on their experience establishing data sets for thermal drying ovens. This presentation also included experience and recommendations on the use of Design of Experiments techniques (DOE) or manual knowledge driven processes to establish oven data for simulation. Heiko Schüler from CADFEM has given a presentation on experience and recommendation of the current semi automatic oven data adjustment which has already been successfully applied to a number of oven projects.

Stefan Gotthold/CADFEM was presenting VPS/DIP, the module for the simulation of air inclusions and carry over in car bodies passing through a basin, i.e. for cleaning, phosphating or electro coating. The presentation of a full car body model passing through a basin demonstrated the power of this unique solution. Jürgen Wibbeler/CADFEM has shown a first impression on the coupling of VPS/DIP and VPS/EDC for simulation of electro coating. Occurrence and transport of air bubbles in the car body will affect the resulting coat thickness distribution. Coupling both modules will help to improve the accuracy of the simulation.

Christian Meyer and Thomas Schneider from CADFEM demonstrated the status and future of the modelling process for simulation models for VPS/EDC, VPS/DIP and VPS/ESC including a live demonstration of Toolkit V5 components developed up to now. CATIA Toolkit technology will be improved in the near future. Time and cost for model creation is mission critical for some simulation topics. CADFEM will continuously focus on new methods to improve the modelling speed. For early 2008 new solutions for faster modelling have been announced by CADFEM.

Many new features of VPS/EDC for electro coating have been presented by Jürgen Wibbeler/CADFEM. Among them are relative motion between anodes and car body, a parametric basin modelling scheme and the enhanced usability and flexibility using VPS/EDC.

In reality, the coating results are always prone to scatter. Besides new features of VPS/DRY Cord Steinbeck-Behrens/CADFEM was focussing on performance, sensitivities and advanced aspects for thermal drying of car bodies. Parallelization gives a significant speed up of the drying simulation using VPS/DRY. Advanced post processing features have been added to the software. Sensitivities of thermal properties, oven settings but also the influence of evaporation on the local temperatures has been shown on examples. This presentation should encourage users to focus on the statistical nature of many of the parameters involved in the drying process and focus on effects with large influence on temperature of the car body during the drying process.

VPS/UV a new module on ultraviolet curing of 3D-objects with complex shape has been presented by Matthias Schneider/Fraunhofer IPA. VPS/UV is developed and distributed by the consortium consisting of CADFEM, Fraunhofer IPA and Fusion UV Systems, USA. Improved shadowing calculations, reflection and absorption features, complex radiator models, spectral dependencies and use of optimization to generate a perfect path and lamp setting has been presented.