2004 Award Winners
Award-winning project: The intelligent simulation of bus transmissions
Project partners: Voith Turbo GmbH & Co. KG | Steinbeis Transfer Center New Technologies in Transportation Engineering/Ulm
Regular bus services have a specific operating cycle. Bus drivers typically stop at three bus stops per kilometre. They set off, accelerate and then brake again; full load alternates with idling – a challenge for the engine and gearbox. Manufacturers are using sophisticated simulation programmes to test which gearboxes are the most promising for this sector.
Manufacturers of automatic gearboxes optimise the shift programmes to minimise fuel consumption as much as possible. Operators expect low maintenance costs and a long service life. To meet these standards and cater to their customers’ individual requirements, manufacturers simulate every single gearbox component before production. The expected load on the drivetrain can be visualised on screen. Using this data, engineers can optimise the gearbox and calculate the load in advance.
At Voith Turbo GmbH & Co. KG, a leading manufacturer of drive technology and a division of Voith AG (turnover of 3.3 billion euros, 24,000 employees), the decision was taken as early as the 1980s to develop, in collaboration with the Steinbeis Transfer Centre for New Technologies in Transport Engineering based in Ulm, a complex simulation programme specifically for automatic gearboxes in public service buses. This programme has been continuously expanded and adapted through subsequent contracts. The so-called Voith Powertrain Optimisation Programme, or ‘VASOP’ for short, shows at the click of a mouse which clutches, gears and shafts are under particular strain and how transmissions can be optimally adapted to the weight, wheels, axle ratio and engine of specific public service buses. With the help of the simulation, service life, fuel savings, new materials, and the intelligent selection of gears, shift points and transmission coupling structures can be optimised in the long term.
The software linked to VASOP has now proved so successful that it has been fully integrated into Voith Turbo’s development process. Without the simulation programme, it is no longer conceivable to ‘reconfigure’ a gearbox with a modified or completely new gear-selection programme. Data and results from VASOP are now also used in other areas of the company, such as the global collection and analysis of gearbox data – a key prerequisite for the automatic gearboxes of tomorrow.