HOW A TESTBED WORKS

The world of testbeds may seem unglamorous next to the sight of a brand-new Formula 1 car taking to the track for the first time on a crisp February morning in Barcelona, but when trial integration runs in a simulation setting produce faults that can be rectified before resulting in costly stoppages during real-life testing, an effective testbed set-up becomes worth its weight in gold.

“It’s much more efficient because we remove everything from the real world that induces uncertainty to the test,” explains AVL RACING’S Matthias Dank. “If you want an objective comparison of changes on your engine or your battery, ideally remove everything else and simulate it with devices that mimic the physical influence on it. If you have to build an entire car to see the effects of changes on the combustion engine, you spend a lot of money on your set-up.”

In addition to selling testbeds to customers, AVL has more than 90 specific testbeds for all purposes – from batteries to inverters and turbochargers – that can be run simultaneously at its Graz HQ, many of them unmanned and around the clock.

But while the driver simulatorfull vehicle testbed hook-up is AVL’S main attraction, around 80-90% of its testing is done without a driver in the loop. Instead, it makes use of AVL’S dynamic Vehicle Simulation Model (VSM), “a dynamic driver that is a close representation of a human” accurate to within four milliseconds, which provides greater repeatability of results and saves the driver for when they are required to give the final sign-off.

AVL ambassador Ferdinand Habsburg is a regular visitor to the simulator as the company seeks to assist the next generation of Austrian talent, but the F3 regular would soon burn out if he was called upon every time AVL needed to run a simulation.

“What you want to avoid is having a driver booked up for four hours of testing, and spend three hours troubleshooting,” adds Dank. “We let the driver focus on what he really has to do.”