Luxury car maker’s first hybrid powertrain undergoes simulation and NVH assessment to suit brand identity
Bentley’s renowned W12 engine will be succeeded by a new, performance-focused V8 hybrid powertrain, producing the highest power output ever offered in a Bentley. Dubbed the Ultra Performance Hybrid, the new powertrain has taken on the tradition of the company’s long history of performance enhancing technology.
Bentley introduced Supercharging in the 1920s, which was an early forebear to the use of turbocharging from the 1980s to the present day. Now, the luxury car manufacturer has gone a step further by introducing “electrocharging” using a hybrid system to create what will be the most advanced and most powerful powertrain in Bentley’s 105-year history. The new system builds on Bentley’s existing hybrid powertrains, but goes even further in the level of performance and efficiency it brings with more than 750 PS and a 50 mile (80 km) electric-only range.
Bentley’s 6.0-litre twin turbo W12 engine will be retired this summer, with the new Ultra Performance Hybrid to become Bentley’s flagship powertrain. As such, the company was keen to ensure that it has the characteristics that its potential and existing customers would expect.
These expectations don’t just revolve around power delivery but also levels of comfort and the acoustic signature or the engine. In this respect, Noise Vibration & Harshness (NVH) had a significant role to play in the engine’s development.
Full Spectrum Simulation
Prototype testing has always been an important part in refining the ride, comfort and performance of Bentley’s products but the detection of flaws or the refinement of design becomes more expensive and time-consuming the further along the delivery schedule the testing is performed.
Simulation has become well established as a robust vehicle development and prototyping tool that enables testing to be performed earlier in the design cycle. However, not all simulators have the capability of making full NVH assessments.
To overcome this, Bentley installed a Compact Full Spectrum Driving Simulator at its facility in Crewe. According to the company, this offers a more sustainable alternative to physical testing for development of vehicle comfort and will dramatically cut the number of real-world road miles Bentley engineers will cover in order to test their products.
Among the elements the simulator can accurately assess are ride comfort, cabin acoustics and vibration, as well as supporting seat development. It will enable ride comfort evaluations over various emulated road surfaces, such as potholes and bumps, providing a valuable and time-saving representation of vehicle response, long before the reliance on physical prototypes would have previously enabled.
Reduced Road Testing
The simulation technology will save around 85 tons of CO2 and up to 350 days of traditional road testing per vehicle prototype. Developed in Italy by global simulator specialists VI-grade, the compact system will play a major role in the development of Bentley’s forthcoming range of battery electric vehicles as well as its hybrid variants.
According to Dr Matthias Rabe, Member of the Board for Engineering at Bentley Motors, beyond its technical capabilities, the Dynamic Driving Simulator brings substantial sustainability benefits, reducing the need for both physical prototypes and extensive physical tests, the latter often involving cars and colleagues shipped to remote locations around the world.
“As our customers would expect, the system will also play a key part in defining the luxury experience associated with every Bentley car,” he says.
Charlie Smith, Virtual Vehicle Engineer at Bentley Motors, says that this state-of-the-art system represents a significant advancement in the company’s virtual development capabilities and will allow core Bentley attributes to be refined in a dynamic, driver-in-the-loop virtual environment for the first time.
“This simulator is a strategic step towards accelerating our product development cycle, minimising reliance on physical prototypes and enhancing simulation capabilities,” he says.
Simulator Assessment
The delivery of the FSS technology followed an assessment that Bentley engaged in to evaluate the effectiveness of multi-attitude simulation for a comprehensive assessment of motion, vibration and sound. The evaluation took place at VI-grade SimCenter.
According to VI-Grade, the technology will now provide Bentley with the ability to perform vehicle NVH development, Ride and Handling tuning, a thorough evaluation of primary and secondary ride comfort, and engage in development work on the overall sound experience for interior noise assessment.
Alessio Lombardi, VI-grade EMEA and Americas Sales Director, commented, “We are excited to contribute to Bentley’s journey of digital development, driving excellence in the automotive industry.”
NVH Driver-in-the-Loop Simulation
The VI-Grade Full Spectrum Simulator (FSS) was released just one year ago at the SAE Noise and Vibration Conference in Michigan to address what had until then been an unmet demand of vehicle design and development engineers to experience and evaluate ride motion, vibration and sound in a single, small footprint driving simulator.
By providing full-spectrum, multi-attribute simulation from 0.5Hz to 20kHz, the FSS Simulator allows evaluators to experience both primary and secondary driving motion, vibration and sound all at once, combining vehicle dynamics and NVH applications in a single device. Suitable for ride comfort evaluation, motorsport applications, seat evaluation and overall vehicle refinement characterisation, the device meets the needs of NVH engineering without needing to invest in a traditional and more expensive hexapod simulator.
Thanks to its small footprint it can be easily accommodated in the engineering office rather than occupying its own lab space.
At the time of its release, VI-Grade’s Dave Bogema said he believed that the FSS Simulator would be the ideal tool for in-depth and accurate virtual prototype evaluations, allowing engineers to make vehicle design decisions with greater confidence.
“Powered by a VI-grade AutoHawk real-time computer, the FSS Simulator will help engineers experience multiple attributes of a vehicle and genuinely assess and understand how the car will feel and sound, without the need for physical prototypes,” he concluded.
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