BREUBERG, Germany — Pirelli & C. S.p.A. has inaugurated a Virtual Development Center (VDC) at its Breuberg tire factory complex that the company claims will cut tire development time by up to 30% while also cutting the need for physical prototypes by a similar amount.
Pirelli said establishing this center — which features a virtual driving simulator — represents a "considerable advantage" for Pirelli in terms of its relationships with its original-equipment (OE) customers. This is Pirelli's second VDC, following the opening of the first one in early 2020 at Pirelli headquarters in Milan, Italy.
Pirelli did not disclose its investment in setting up the VDC at its Breuberg campus, where it maintains two separate tire plants, one for car tires and one for motorcycle tires. The testing department there is staffed by over 250 engineers and support staff.
"In our VDC, we can develop tires for cars that don't yet exist in reality, but which are provided to us by car manufacturers in the form of digital models," Thomas Michel, chief technological officer at Pirelli Deutschland G.m.b.H., said.
"Artificial intelligence (AI) and neural networks play an important role in this innovative tire development. This is because they speed up the development of virtual tire models enormously. What used to take hours or even days is now often completed in just a few seconds. It's a sort of a virtual tire factory."
Pirelli did not identify which virtual simulator it's using in Breuberg; the simulator in Milan was sourced from VI-grade G.m.b.H., a Darmstadt, Germany-based company that describes itself as a "leading" provider of best-in-class software products and services for advanced applications in the field of system-level simulation.
Pirelli recently honored VI-grade as one its five top suppliers for 2023.
The virtual system allows Pirelli engineers to enter virtual versions of all vehicle models provided by the car manufacturers into the simulator. Test drives then begin with the virtual tire models. The engineers see how vehicle behavior is affected or should be affected by steering, acceleration and braking interventions on the virtual vehicle.
"The VDC, including the simulator, supports all virtual project phases for German car manufacturers," Florian Waffenschmidt, head of VDC, said, noting the company can conduct virtual testing of tires for electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids as well as tires for vehicles powered by internal-combustion engines.
Pirelli is one of four major tire maker to disclose they have dynamic driving simulators as part of their tire-testing capabilities. In early 2020, Goodyear, Group Michelin and Pirelli all disclosed their investments in the technology, and recently Continental A.G. disclosed it had brought on stream a vehicle-dynamics testing simulator at its Contidrom tire test center in Wietze, Germany.
Pirelli also recently bolstered its research and development capabilities in North America with the commissioning of a $15 million R&D center at its tire plant in Silao, Mexico.