Development of New Tools for Crash and Safety Analysis - Performance Driven LS-DYNA Simulation with ANSA and META

The increasingly demanding and complex requirements in Crash Analysis, call for continuous and innovative software development. BETA CAE Systems in an effort to meet and exceed the requirements of the industry is introducing new technologies, both in the pre-processing area with ANSA, and in post-processing with μETA. This paper presents these new technologies. BETA CAE Systems goal has always been to provide fast and automated tools that allow the users to be efficient, and to easily manage their CAE models. Tools like the Batch Mesher, Data Management and Task Manager have provided solutions for the seamless workflow from CAD to Analysis. Recently, taking into account the needs and practices followed by most of the CAE users, a new tool has been introduced, designed for handling and controlling loadcase build-up with includes. This includes Configuration Manager in addition to simplifying the handling of includes configurations, it also keeps track of the different includes versions, with the assistance of the ANSA Data Manager, thus providing a unique advantage. In the field of Safety the rapid development work continuous. The need for better and more accurate behavior of Seatbelts has resulted in increased complexity of the Solver’s (LS-DYNA) seatbelt technologies. BETA has responded quickly to meet the new 2D Seatbelt requirements by advancing and automating the existing seatbelt tool. Increased automation has also been achieved in the areas of Seat-Dummy positioning, and Pedestrian and Interior Safety analysis set-up tools. In theses areas there is a need to provide the users with the ability to explore the validity of their models by performing Robustness and Sensitivity analysis. This area is currently heavily researched in order to provide easy to use tools for the engineers. New Functionality in the field of results transferring across simulations is being introduced. The build-up of a full crash model can be enriched by the results of stamping analysis, allowing for the consideration of local thickness changes and local hardening. The various aspects of streamlining the mapping process and handling the stamp data are addressed. Integral parts of the process are the transparent positioning of the parts from the stamp to the crash design space, the seamless application of the results and the model’s automatic update upon changes. Post-processing capabilities of META have also been complemented by significant developments. The support of FEMZIP files stemming from the latest FEMZIP version is added and the reading performance has been improved. The model handling has gained more flexibility through allowing different model attributes per window display, which also results in minimum memory requirements since multiple windows layout can be achieved without loading the same model multiple times. Materials are now identified and treated as pids providing a better overview of the model and enabling a post-processing on materials basis. Measuring has been enriched with more options such as the distance between different states, the calculation of angles between a user defined vector and any of the global axes or planes and the calculation of roll-pitch-yaw angles. Similarly, the tracking of distances and angles has been added to the processing of real test videos. The implementation of mapping algorithms has enabled, among others, the comparison of results of models with different mesh. More crash criteria have been added for within the 2Dplot module and correlation of curvesnow possible. Reporting in pptx format is further enhanced and an Excel spreadsheet editor has been developed. Automation capabilities are extended even more and a new tool for the automatic creation of a pedestrian report, based on a minimum input from the user, is included now within the standard package.