Is it going left, right, or wrong? Smart automatic process and data validation
More data requires automated process
In recent years, the amount of data that an NVH engineer gets to process is always increasing. This has an impact on the way we do processing and analysis. While you can easily accept to manually select specific data for 2 or 3 runs, it gets more difficult to swallow when the input data is 10 or 100 times bigger. “Simple” manual repetitive work is prone to error, time-consuming, and —let’s be honest— boring. Smart automatic processing and data validation are key.
Let’s take a small example with steering analysis. The typical measurement is a series of left and right turn, where rotational speed, steering angle, and a number of accelerometers, microphones, strain gauges… are measured. The processing consists in the calculation of a spectrum averaged. But here comes the tricky part: We would like to separate the left and right turn direction.
Is it going left or right?
Locally, with Simcenter Testlab Neo process designer, you can easily and visually select time segments. These selected time segments are then used for further processing. In the example below, we see a manual selection of the segments. First time selection of left turn, second time selection of right turn.
Select-process-save, it works all fine. But is it applicable to a scenario with 5 or 10 or more left/right turn events?
It is going left and right!
That is where the flexibility and efficiency of process designer comes in for rescue. In the next example, we will automatically split the left turn and right turn segments. The “extract segment (rule based)” method can automatically extract, and split or concatenate segments based on a predefined rule. This rule can be based on temperature, speed, acceleration, combination of multiple signals into a virtual channel… In our case, we use the angular position of the steering to extract only left turns or right turns. The process includes a spectrum average to get the final result on the concatenated segments.
What if it is going wrong?
Automatic splitting of left and right turn made the process easier, quicker, and less error-prone! But this has a drawback, we have no real control on the selected segments. It is all automated. What if the content is not very good? Shouldn’t we exclude bad segments? We do it naturally when selecting manually segments.
In this last step of our processing, we will add an automatic check in the process. We limit the maximum speed of the steering to a predefined value. Segments that do not fulfill the requirements are rejected, so we are sure that this is not going wrong.
More about Simcenter Testlab
In a couple of clicks with Simcenter Testlab Neo process designer, the NVH engineer can ensure an automatic process and data validation of a simple scenario. Follow the links below for more information.
