Efficient Coupling of Refined and Standard Meshes in Full
Vehicle Crash Simulations
Aleksandar Bach (Ford R&A Europe), Marian Bulla
(Altair)
The complexity of finite element models is continuously increasing,
not only due to the availability of powerful computer clusters
but also due to the demand for an improved representation
of the reality.
In order to be able to predict accurate deflections or even
material failure, the mesh of current crash models needs to
be refined in certain areas. A reduction of the element size
leads in general to a reduction of the critical time step,
which is in addition to the total amount of nodes and elements
highly impacting the computation time of an explicit crash
solver.
In close cooperation with Ford Research & Advanced Engineering
Europe, Altair has developed a new approach, the so-called
Multi-Domain (MD) approach, enabling an efficient coupling
of refined and standard meshes. A large CAE model may be split
into multiple domains with each domain having its own time
step. This leads to a significant reduction of the total CPU
time compared to a mono-domain computation with standard and
refined meshes using a common time step.
The MD approach for the crash solver Radioss has been implemented
on the Ford Motor Company super-computer cluster. First benchmarks
at Ford R&A Europe have shown promising results, revealing
a further potential within the industrial environment of crash
analyses.
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