Accelerating Digital Design with Cloud-native Onshape

00:00 Need to get closer to the product design and creation, not just using the product at the racetrack. That was a great decision for me. I found that having done race engineering and design, aerodynamic design, I could have an overview for the project and I started my company in Limited more than ten years ago now in my 40s. I focused on electric mobility in motorsport.

00:34 The car you see in the middle is a nio ep9, an electric supercar that we designed with NIO, the Chinese OEM. And that's when I discovered electric mobility and I got really passionate about it. I'm still currently a consultant for the Jaguar Formula E team, and as you can see, everything really led to 4 to 4. For me, 4 to 4 is a full electric high performance hypercar And I also really love

01:06 the idea of using the Internet and the cloud to develop such projects. So I decided to set a really complicated, difficult and dangerous mission for 4 to 4. So what we're going to do with it is. We are trying to go and beat Porsche. And set a new ultimate lap record at the Nurburgring. For those of you who follow a bit racing, Nurburgring is a very prestigious and famous track in Germany.

01:39 It's very dangerous. And so far, only Porsche really has gone to go and set ultimate lap records there. They started in 1983 with the 946 and set a six minutes, 11 seconds. And recently they went back with the 909 and set five minutes, 19 seconds. In the new era of electric mobility, we can push the envelope. And we believe throughout our simulations that 4 to 4 can achieve

02:12 a five minute zero seven. So a bit more than 10s faster than Porsche. We are trying to compete against established big organizations here. We love Porsche. A lot of respect for this brand, but I know we can go and beat them. Through the work we are doing and four two for design. But we also need a new model too, to make sure we achieve this mission.

02:42 The way we develop the project is creating a network of talented people using great software. The combination of people and software is really powerful for us. So we are more than a company. We really believe in open network. To this day, we have more than 50 people who have contributed participated in this project. I have only met a few of them. So we met on the Internet. Our test driver is lives in Abu Dhabi. We've got software developer in Spain.

03:18 I have designers in America, in Asia, North Africa. So I really love that we are going with a distributed team to develop 4 to 4. In addition, we need great software and now we have in our network some amazing companies. Obviously Onshape. I discovered Onshape a few years ago and got really passionate about the software, so I designed with Onshape a lot and Onshape is part of the foundation

03:53 for the project. We work with Unity for real time simulation, and we work with total steam for aerodynamics simulation in CFD. And we've done this now for our driving simulation and motion platform in the UK. And we also have committed the project to be open source. So everything we do is shared with the public. And the day the record is achieved,

04:24 everyone will be able to access the design of the car, the data. And this is why we are an open network. How can you participate in the network so you can go on Parade.com This is a communication platform. Very easy way for you to chat with us. And this is where all our collaborators are interacting. In an open communication way.

04:55 You can also become an investor of the project. We have a digital shares program and obviously all our design is in Onshape in public documents. Our software in GitHub and LinkedIn is the social media platform of choice for us. If you want to follow us, you will find us there. Let me now dive a little bit into the technicals of 4 to 4. Obviously for to for us to become and remain the fastest electric car in

05:25 the world. This is what I said as a mission for the team. The specification is very close to Formula One, so the car is made essentially of carbon composite material. The weight is 1000kg and we need to keep it below a maximum of 1000kg is important. Half of the weight is the chassis. Half of the weight is the electric powertrain. We are using proven formula E motors,

05:55 one at the front and two at the back for an optimum power distribution. The total power is 750kW, so about 1000 horsepower. So you can see why this car is so performant. We use single speed so we don't shift gears. It's a single speed transmission front and rear four wheel drive car. The battery is 50 kilowatt hour, similar to what you would find in a Tesla road car. The difference is we use that energy in only five minutes.

06:28 So we go from 100% charge to 0% in a bit more than five minutes. You can imagine the intensity of the lap. We've got very fast accelerations. We reach 100 KPA in only two seconds, which makes it one of the fastest accelerating car on this planet. A top speed of 360 KPA and very advanced aerodynamic system on the car. Now that I've explained a little bit about the specification for the car,

07:01 how did we create this product? As I said, for us, everything starts in Onshape, so we design everything in Onshape and the end goal is to go to Unity where we drive the car in the digital world. We do a number of things. For example, we use SDL export to have the graphics for the car in real time. We use Onshape simulation to have a very good estimate of the mass of the car,

07:31 which is critical for us and lightweight the car as much as possible. And we also use to go to our partner total team to do a CFD aerodynamics simulation. And all of this is converging to the car model in unity. Here I'm showing an example of the aerodynamics study we do on the left. You can see that we have applied a geometry change to the underfloor of the car. So the red to the blue. This is done in Onshape in a branch.

08:05 And from there we go to Total and we can see the impact of the static pressure under the car. And from there, we can decide if this is a positive or a negative change for us. And we keep it or not. So it's unit testing. To this date, we've done more than 4000 unit tests. To achieve the performance of 5.5 to 1 aerodynamic efficiency so the car can generate 5.5 times more downforce than than drag.

08:42 It's it's really the. The most efficient car I have worked on. Let me show you the end result in unity. When we put this car model together and add a model of the track that comes from laser scan, so very accurate and all the bumps of the track are there and use the Dayanisma platform. We drive the car and predict a lap time of five minutes. Zero seven. Let's have a look.

10:19 This is the most immersive driving experience you'll ever get without building the car. I've driven this simulator. It's pretty amazing. This is a platform that Formula One is using. It's the best in class. We've built the real time software ourselves, the graphics of the car that you see. So the inside of the car comes from Onshape. Okay, so everything's been done in Onshape. The track comes from a different source. And I have to say I'm so proud of the team to have achieved this integration.

10:51 You know, we've put everything together to a very high standard. This simulator is located in Bristol in the UK, and it's the best way for us to experience the car before it exists and and also de-risk the project, understand the performance of the car. We will not build the car before we are sure we can achieve the record. Now, we've been in development process for a few years. We keep pushing limits and going faster and faster around the track

11:21 and sometimes things can go a little bit wrong, which is exactly why we do this process. I'm showing you here what's happened after some development that allowed us to go faster and faster around the track.

12:13 Yeah. So we are not modeling damage here. But you can imagine we do not want this to happen in real life. Maybe some of you have seen some cars at Le Monde 24 hours a few years ago taking off in a similar fashion. I can tell you this is realistic. This can happen. I was both scared and happy when I when we had this issue because we effectively discovered this issue before we build the car. And it only is possible if we put the best modeling tools together and

12:43 the best physical models together. What happens here is the track is, as I said, very dangerous. It's undulated we go over Crest and as we were going faster and faster we started to lose contact with the ground. So the front tires lost contact with the ground. The car takes off a little bit. It not only takes 50mm of lift and then the air goes under the car and lifts the car and takes off. So what was downforce is reversed into lift. It's definitely something that we want to see in simulation and fix.

13:16 So we have a fix for this. We have done a lot of analysis and there are three locations on the track where this can happen. So we the car now has got an automatic speed limiter. So when it comes into that zone, the car will slow down automatically, even if the driver keeps its foot down and makes sure we stay at a safe speed and then go again. So. That's really good that we've been able to to discover this. Although our use of simulation for us.

13:47 We do a lot of analysis in Onshape using Onshape simulation. On the left here you can see suspension assembly and we are doing static analysis, making sure the stiffness and the strength for the assembly is correct. We were really happy to see Onshape delivering these simulation tools which speeds up our program. On the right hand side, this is a thermal analysis of the battery modules.

14:18 This is done outside Onshape, but the model is coming from Onshape. We I explained that we discharge the battery very quickly and when you discharge the battery, it heats up as we know, and we have to stay under 70 degrees at the end of the lap. So we start the lap at 20 degrees. We cannot start below because the battery will not function and we don't want to go over 70 degrees at the end of the lap when the battery is fully discharged. So we have cooling systems dimensioned just for that over the five minutes.

14:49 So we do need accurate models of the thermal behavior of the car. Another use of simulation for us. Is rendering studios in Onshape we again because the car will only be built at the very end. We have to try and show what it's like in the virtual space the best way we can. So again, very happy that Onshape provides this amazing cloud based cloud solution for us.

15:22 And and we've been able to create these beautiful pictures. So I want to explain quickly what it's been like designing in the cloud for us. So when we design, we use the full capability of Onshape in terms of collaboration. This is an example of component at the back of the car, this green stiffening brace, which is an organic shape coming off simulation and topology optimization.

15:53 And we have worked similarly simultaneously tenuously in one document for people were involved, located on three different continents, and we achieved this design using again, the power of the cloud and collaboration tools within Onshape. So as a summary of why we. Like to use Onshape and why it's so powerful for 4 to 4 program. Our team is distributed around the globe

16:25 and we've Onshape and also the power of the open source access. So we our documents are public inside the Onshape platform. We are really making the most of collaboration tools, branching and merging. I explain, for example, the aerodynamic development. We are branching a lot and when we have something that works, we are going to merge it back to the main model.

16:55 And the public sharing has been powerful for us as we are building a community behind the project. I want to say again that if you want to contact us or be in touch, just come on, Patreon.com. It's a bit like a WhatsApp platform, so you can send messages to us very easily or just follow our progress and see how our people are working together. But also come on LinkedIn and follow us there.