Automotive OEMs and their suppliers must manage competing demands in terms of crashworthiness and occupant safety. Consumers are increasingly influenced by product reviews, including the number of crash "stars" a vehicle receives. In addition, crash legislation and regulations worldwide are becoming more stringent, and growing environmental concerns require OEMs to find ways to improve fuel economy through the use of lighter materials, alternate powertrain designs, and other emerging technologies, while not compromising vehicle crashworthiness characteristics. Global competition necessitates that OEMs and suppliers respond quickly to market demands, nimbly designing and manufacturing new vehicles that address new requirements, including those involving safety.
SIMULIA provides realistic simulation solutions—such as our Abaqus Unified FEA product suite, Multiphysics, simulation automation and optimization capabilities, and SLM products—that address a multitude of automotive engineering challenges. We offer real-world simulation solutions for crashworthiness and occupant safety within the Abaqus Unified FEA product suite, enabling automotive customers to meet the challenges noted above. While not only providing a full range of required simulation capabilities, a primary advantage of our solutions is the concept of Unified FEA. Our customers find that carrying out major full vehicle simulation applications (or performance attributes) such as NVH and system level durability, in addition to crashworthiness and occupant safety, within the same product suite provides distinct advantages and benefits. These include the ability to share complex models between performance attributes to readily exchange simulation data both within and across performance attributes, and the potential to carry out multidisciplinary optimization.
Solutions capabilities
- General (automatic) contact that enables contact to be defined easily and completely for the entire model, regardless of model complexity
- Mesh independent point fasteners, to model the thousands of spotwelds, rivets and other similar connections that are typical in modern automobiles as well as capabilities to model the compliance, damage, and failure behavior that can occur in these connections during a crash event
- Modeling of common failure mechanisms that can occur in sheet metals, from instability failure to shear and ductile fracture
- A complete suite of seatbelt functionalities that heavily leverage the connector element library in Abaqus, providing for the efficient simulation of all pertinent seatbelt behaviors
- Airbag functionality using the uniform pressure methodology that is generalized for multiple chambers and includes a nonlinear fabric model and capabilities to handle the effects of initial wrinkling in the folded state
- Competitive performance that utilizes domain decomposition, ideal for modern distributed memory parallel (DMP) systems such as clusters
- Simulation process automation
- Design optimization
