“There would often be tens of thousands of crash simulations, but the physical testing is perhaps one-tenth of that,” says Schramm.ĭuring the development of its Kodiak model, Škoda simulated 99% of crash tests. The ability of virtual testing to achieve a notably more robust understanding is great.”Įven eight years ago, the number of crash test simulations carried out in a car’s development cycle was extremely high. “We have a catalog of 338 crash types, but in reality there are probably 338,000 configurations. Matthew Avery, director of research at Thatcham Research and Euro NCAP board member, believes there is scope for even greater robustness.

In hours they can understand if the changes have produced a different performance or not.” “With simulations, engineers can analyze the vehicle’s performance, changing the values of the boundary conditions. The robustness of the results has also improved. How they behave,” says Cristian Jimenez, business development manager of body development at Spanish engineering services company Applus+ Idiada Group. “Engineers are able to understand what happens to the structural parts of the vehicle and In addition, improved scalability of massively parallel processing (MPP) versions of code has enabled detailed crash analysis to be completed in hours, while automation has further streamlined the process, with machine learning tools the main driver of refinements.Īs well as cost and time-to-market savings, supercomputer simulations enable deeper analysis of passive safety systems. Most high-performance computing (HPC) systems run on Linux or Windows, and the use of just two operating systems has simplified the market for software and structural analysis solvers – programs that contain comprehensive material and rupture libraries and solve numerical equations. The simulation has to be distributed over the cores, and this is not easy for crash simulations because you’re subdividing the model on the different cores.”

“There is more fidelity in the models, but if there are 500 or 1,000 cores, each core must work as hard as the others. “We have finite element models with 10 and 20 million elements,” Schramm notes. “We now have nodes with 192 cores.” And rises in computing power naturally enable more intricate simulation detail. “Development is mind-boggling,” says Uwe Schramm, chief technical officer at Altair. Designed to do multiple highly complex calculations simultaneously, supercomputer hardware has evolved over three decades to the point where a typical OEM system has 256 cores. The ever-increasing power of supercomputers is making virtual crash test simulations more predictable. Automotive Testing Technology International takes a look at the technology and its growing influence on the crash testing process. Three decades after their introduction, supercomputers provide ever more powerful, reliable and time-saving virtual simulations.

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