The overall requirements on the wire harness design increase with each new car generation as more and more functions are integrated or been electrified. In addition, the available installation space in a car decreases and the harness cannot be installed as assumed during the design phase. This happens particularly to thick bundles with many cable outlets or to tight bending radii. A simulation-based development in the design phase can lead to a reduction of iterations in the manufacturing of prototypes, and hence will reduce production costs and development times.

Wire harnesses pose a particular challenge in numerical simulations due to their flexible composite structures and their complex mechanical behavior. In this contribution an interface to the structured wire harness descriptions in the Vehicle Electric Container (VEC) format and the integration of a numeric simulation method for the stiffness calculation of individual harness segments are presented with the HSS.Calc tool from Fraunhofer LBF.

Based on the data structure, Finite Element models are obtained through a recursive modeling process. Program code in ANSYS APDL and ANSYS Workbench is generated and the numerical calculations are performed automatically. The numerical results are validated by experimental data.