The digital-first recreational vehicle: Hymer

Hymer designs and manufactures camper vans and motorhomes for every need. For its new flagship Venture S camper van, Hymer used Siemens Xcelerator software portfolio elements including Solid Edge and NX.

On the inside, Hymer's Venture S camper is setting standards in the van segment: a built-in workstation for working and conducting virtual meetings; a spacious rain shower; clever storage compartments for everything from pots and pans to shoes and jackets; and a retractable projector that lets you beam your favourite films onto a pull-down screen.

The Venture S doesn't disappoint on the outside either, with a patio-style back door, and temperature-regulating, energy-efficient bodywork that reduces the surface temperature of the vehicle.

With solar panels and the use of sustainable materials such as felt and bamboo for the interior, the Venture S is right on trend and as flexible as the consumer expects a mobile home to be.

The design engineers verify the structural integrity of their designs using finite element modelling (FEM) analyses embedded in Solid Edge. These everyday basic verifications are easy to execute and already deliver some good first sight on structural data.

More in-depth stress analyses are outsourced to The Team Technology (TTT), an internal automotive lightweight construction department within the Erwin Hymer Group. They use Simcenter 3D software for FEM analysis.

This two-stage verification process establishes a knowledge gain during the early phases of product design, reducing the number of physical prototypes required.

Simcenter is also capable of more. As a modular software solution, Simcenter has components for every engineering and design task. Ria Kaiser, head of Lightweight Design and New Materials in Erwin Hymer Group's TTT, is currently exploring the possibility of employing Simcenter FLOEFD for testing the aerodynamic shape of different components.

'A major advantage is that our engineers don't need to get used to a new interface,' she says. 'That keeps the learning curve to a minimum and lets them produce results faster.'

Examples here include ergonomic design verification using VR gear to reveal if the solutions are practical, and augmented reality (AR) to check the correctness of data as early as the prototype construction stage.

In the future, AR capabilities may also be used to support maintenance or improve customer usability. In a recent Hackathon with the Technical University of Munich (TUM), students developed a first app prototype with the help of the Siemens low-code platform Mendix to create an interactive user manual that could also benefit from AR features.

With the help of VR technologies, not only can on-site staff in production better visualise technical instructions but customers' or vendors' interiors can be experienced vividly, even when geographically dispersed.

'A digital prototype also brings decisive advantages for marketing,' says Frank Heinrichsen, head of Marketing at Hymer GmbH & Co. KG.

The detailed digital twin of the Venture S allowed the marketing team at Hymer to create communications materials complete with photos and videos – even before the first physical prototype was built.

Similarly, Hymer also used the digital twin to initiate training for its production and retail operations – again, without a physical vehicle.