Section: Bilateral Contracts and Grants with Industry

Schneider Electric

This action started in 2001 with my post-doc co–supported by Schneider Electric and CNRS. With some brief interruptions, this action is still active and should further continue. It concerns mainly the simulation and modeling of multi–body systems with contact, friction and impacts with the application for the virtual prototyping of electrical circuit breakers. During these years, various forms of collaborations have been held. Two PhD thesis have been granted by Schneider Electric (D.E. Taha and N. Akhakdar) accompanied with research contracts between Inria and Schneider Electric. Schneider Electric participated also the ANR project Saladyn as a main partner. Without going into deep details of the various actions over the years, the major success of this collaboration is the statistical tolerance analysis of the functional requirements of the circuit breakers with respect to clearance in joints and geometrical tolerances on the parts. Starting from the geometrical descriptions (CAD files) of a mechanism with prescribed tolerances on the manufacturing process, we perform worst-case analysis and Monte–Carlo simulations of the circuit breaker with Siconos and we record the variations in the functional requirements. The difficulty in such simulations are the modeling of contact with friction that models the joints with clearances. The results of these analysis enable Schneider Electric to define the manufacturing precision that has a huge impact of the production cost (Schneider Electric produces several millions of C60-type circuit breaker per year). Note that it is not possible to perform such simulations with the existing software codes of the market. At the beginning, our interlocutor at Schneider Electric was the innovation (R&D) department. Now, we are working and discussing with the business unit, Division Power and Dinnov (M. Abadie, E. Boumediene, X. Herreros) in charge of designing and producing the circuit–breakers. The targeted users are the R&D engineers of Schneider Electric that use simulation tools for designing new models or improving existing circuit breakers. This collaboration continues with new modeling and simulation challenges (flexible parts, multiple impact laws) with the CIFRE PhD of Rami Sayoud.