Automotive manufacturers must design for a number of factors, but paramount among these is occupant safety. Ideally, a vehicle would go for its entire lifespan without ever experiencing a crash, but realistically, accidents happen. If a car is designed for optimal crashworthiness, however, its occupants are much more likely to walk away from the accident unharmed.
Over the last decade, regulations have tightened, making it more difficult to achieve a good safety rating. For example, test speeds have been increased, and traditional automotive models were unable to handle the large amount of crash energy, leading to the collapse of the survival space and a poor safety rating. Overall, this is a positive development, as manufacturers must now design vehicles that can handle these larger amounts of crash energy, leading to better occupant safety.
Simulation enables manufacturers to meet these new challenges, allowing them to design the structure, materials and restraint systems to better distribute crash energy and thus achieve a better safety rating. The tools used in crashworthiness simulation are becoming more advanced, with larger models to improve accuracy and explore new crash loading cases. As these models get larger, efficient tools are needed to prepare them.
Abaqus offers high-fidelity crash models with less abstraction. It provides a robust general contact, a large library of material models that may be applicable to the crash models, various methods of connections to assemble a large model, advanced analysis techniques particularly for the crash, ancillary products for regulation tests, occupant restraint system models, and features for modeling kinematics of the moving components such as suspensions.
In addition, the 3DEXPERIENCE platform allows for life-like visualizations of large data sets. This high-performance visualization uses parallelized multi-core systems and is much faster than Abaqus Viewer. The platform offers a move from engineering visualization to life-like, realistic renderings, allowing non-engineers to better understand the results that they are seeing. This 3DEXPERIENCE High Performance Visualization, or HPVIZ, is powered by a High Performance Visualization Engine which is dedicated to supporting large, realistic FE simulations. With HPVIZ, simulation data can be accessed by any user, on any platform, in any environment. Multi domain analysis can also be explored.
These life-like visualizations are an important development, as numerous individuals are involved in working with crashworthiness simulations, not just engineers. Experts and non-experts alike can understand and interact with these simulations for more effective collaboration and faster results.
To learn more about crashworthiness simulations, tune into the webinar “Crashworthiness Simulations | Recent Advances in Abaqus/Explicit with HPC.” It can be accessed here.
Clare Scott is a SIMULIA Creative Content Advocacy Specialist at Dassault Systèmes. Prior to her work here, she wrote about the additive manufacturing industry for 3DPrint.com. She earned a Bachelor of Arts from Hiram College and a Master of Arts from University College Dublin. Clare works out of Dassault Systèmes’ Cleveland, Ohio office and enjoys reading, acting in local theatre and spending time outdoors.