BMW Motorrad Motorsport adopts VI-BikeRealTime to quickly design and finetune its racing motorbikes
Marburg, Nov 16th, 2011 – VI-grade GmbH, the leading provider of best-in-class products and services to bridge the gap between real world testing and technical simulation, announced that BMW Motorrad Motorsport adopted VI-BikeRealTime to design and optimize its motorbikes for the Superbike World Championship. In detail, the VI-grade dedicated solution for realtime motorbike simulation is used since 2010 for hardware-in-the-loop simulations aimed to optimize laptime for the Superbike World Championship.
The BMW team stood at the World Superbike starting-line for the first time in 2009, with the S 1000 RR racing machine. In Stephanskirchen near Rosenheim in Upper Bavaria, Germany, BMW and Alpha Racing jointly set up a motorsports center of excellence to further develop the race bike. BMW development engineers are responsible for ensuring that the S 1000 RR competes well in the World Superbike class. All the related engineering activities are directly performed at BMW Motorrad: this enables the team to respond quickly and flexibly to new requirements imposed by the test tracks and race tracks.
“Electronics development is one of BMW’s core competencies in the field of motorsports: we believe that electrics and electronics make a bike not only fast, but also reliable”, said Ralf Schmidt, Project manager for electric/electronic, BMW Motorrad Motorsport. “To improve speed and safety of our bikes, our race team chose to use a Full-Size Simulator as a hardware-in-the-loop system to test the ECUs, including running automated tests to test the ECU hardware and closed loop tests with VI-grade tools such as VI-BikeRealTime to ensure the function of the high level software parts like traction control, engine braking, launch control and track detection.”
“We are extremely happy that BMW Motorrad Motorsport selected VI-BikeRealTime as a strategic tool for its engineering activities”, said Juergen Fett, Managing Director of VI-grade. “This confirms that our VI-BikeRealTime solution is the ideal platform to perform hardware-in-the-loop activities on a motorcycle model.”
Mr. Ralf Schmidt from BMW Motorrad Motorsport recently held a keynote speech dedicated to electric and electronic development in the high level motorcycle motorsport sector at the 4th VI-grade Users Conference in Udine, Italy (presentation available at this link).
About VI-BikeRealTime
VI-BikeRealTime is a modeling, post processing and real-time analysis environment for motorcycle models which allows designers, analysts and track engineers to take into account effects from the motorcycle itself as well as from the road profile and the rider. VI-BikeRealTime is also the ideal platform to perform software-in-the-loop and hardware-in-the-loop activities on a motorcycle model. This is made possible thanks to the interface with MATLAB Simulink and with most widely used HIL platforms. In this way engineers can first develop reliable control systems in a safe environment and then test them checking how real ECUs interact with the virtual model. ECUs durability under realistic working conditions can be tested as well. VI-BikeRealTime is interfaced with VI-Motorcycle, the ADAMS-based multibody solution for detailed motorcycle models, and therefore real-time models can be automatically derived from detailed multibody models. This approach, already proven to be successful in the automotive industry, allows users to decrease modelling time, to increase confidence in results and to maintain only one database. VI-BikeRealTime has been proven to deliver reliable results in several different projects with leading motorcycle manufacturers. Despite of the fact that the model is simplified, results match very well experimental measurements. For further information click here.