Crash & Safety

Explicit Dynamic Analysis for Impact and Crash Studies

Many real-world engineering situations involve severe loads applied over very brief time intervals. While testing is crucial to analyze these types of loading scenarios, it can be expensive and sometimes economically infeasible to conduct physical tests when the cost of each prototype is prohibitively high. Moreover, data from a single physical test can be insufficient and companies cannot afford to conduct several of them for more detailed information.

MSC offers explicit dynamics solutions that can simulate the behavior of products from small components to extremely large assemblies, subjected to events such as a drop, ballistic impact, severe vibration, or blast, and help optimize your design to withstand it.

Built-in multiphysics capabilities including fluid-structure interaction ensure accurate and efficient solutions for a wide range of real-world operating environments.

MSC Software is used for many types of explicit modeling:

Non-linear response of solids, fluids and gases and their interactions
Deformation and damage analysis
Material fragmentation
Contact and erosion coupling
Combined blast and fragment loading
Fluid–structure interaction

Drop and crushing testing
High-speed and hypervelocity impacts
Highly nonlinear, transient dynamic forces
Penetration mechanics
Explosive loading and forming
Material failure predictions
Dynamic stress wave prediction

Industry Uses:

Aerospace and Defense: Bird strike, blade-out, ditching, ballistic impact, explosions, crashworthiness, seat design and safety, munitions disposal vessels.
Automotive: crash testing, airbag deployment, hood/door slam, tire/road contact, hydroplaning, fuel tank sloshing, crash barriers.
Packaging: Drop test, fluid-sloshing, bottle filling, can or container crush.
Electronics: Drop test, shipping damage.
Energy: Wind turbine blade stability, bird impact, underwater explosions, pipe impact, nuclear containment vessels.
Government: Safety and defense, safety barriers.
Heavy Equipment / Machinery: Gear failure, crash and impact, grinding mill, mining
Medical: Equipment safety, fluid containers, drop test and impact, ruptures.
Shipbuilding: Underwater explosion, crash, hull impact.

Comprehensive solver capabilities

Wheel drop test

Deep drawing

During transient crash or impact events, structures experience significantly large strains and may also undergo failure.

Hence modeling material nonlinearities to include failure behavior is crucial for accuracy of simulation. MSC solutions provide a vast set of constitutive models that help you model various engineering materials including metals, soils, concrete, composites, plastics, foam, fabric and more.

Since failure mechanisms are unique to each of the material categories, several industry proven models with strong theoretical foundation are available. Using MSC’s unique technologies to predict failure of composites through micromechanical damage models, you can obtain more accurate results compared to traditional macromechanical failure models.

Flexibility of contact analysis set-up

Grinding mill

Vehicle crash

Interaction between multiple structures is an integral part of most nonlinear problems.

Since the deformations of structures are typically large in crush and crash scenarios, they are also likely to experience self-contact because of folding or region failure. These scenarios are handled automatically while accounting for failure and breakage of material from the structure. Ease of contact set-up also saves considerable time for users during the simulation pre-processing stage.

Fluid-structure interaction

Airbag

Smooth particle hydrodynamics

The objective of modeling fluids in a structural analysis is to account for the influence of fluid pressures on the structure and for improved accuracy in structural response prediction.

Structures are generally modeled using Lagrangian scheme where material is tied to a finite element mesh. However, fluids are solved with Eulerian scheme with material being independent of the mesh, but instead flowing through the mesh. Dual schemes are therefore required because of the way structures and fluids behave.

When fluids and structures need to be modeled in a single analysis, the challenge is running these different schemes in a single run. This is accomplished through an automatic coupling algorithm, where two meshes – one for structure and another for fluid, exist. A coupling surface is created between these two domains which acts as a boundary to the flow of material in Eulerian mesh, while enabling transfer of the stresses to the Lagrangian structural mesh causing it to deform.

With capabilities that include fluids and gases, explosion in addition to highly nonlinear structural materials, users can simulate complex models like airbags, gas tank sloshing, hydroplaning, underwater explosions, bottle filling etc.

Performance and robustness of numerical methods

Aircraft crashworthiness

Sloshing analysis performance data

In the case of short, transient events like crush and crash, the element size and time step needs to be much smaller to capture the higher order modes effectively, leading to very large models. Explicit solutions are well suited for the models with several hundred thousands of elements with significant nonlinearity.

The parallel processing capabilities offered by MSC Software enable you to take advantage of cheaper hardware to gain the most out of your software investments. Making use of MPI (Message Passing Interface) to communicate between multiple processors that may be on shared or distributed memory systems, our technology helps you conduct your virtual tests rapidly.