XXIV ICTAM, 21-26 August 2016, Montreal, Canada

ACCELERATION OF CAR CRASH SIMULATIONS

Jörg Fehr∗1 and Dennis Grunert1
1
Institute of Engineering and Computational Mechanics, University of Stuttgart, Germany

Summary The automotive industry is in need of fast crash test simulations. Instead of using faster hardware, a modern approach consists of
reducing the system size of the underlying equations while retaining important system properties and controlling the approximation error.
Linear variants of this so-called model order reduction are well explored and therefore used as much as possible. In a car crash scenario,
some parts of the automobile exhibit large deformations, whereas others experience mostly small vibrations. We therefore identify linear
behaving parts of the model and separate/reduce them with modern, improved Component Mode Synthesis approaches. The interface plays
a crucial role in the speedup, hence an interface reduction is also required. The application to a kart model delivers promising results.
Additionally, a workflow is developed, which can be adopted to a full car model consisting of more than one million degrees of freedom.

MOTIVATION

Unlike several decades ago, hardware crash tests are now commonly substituted by simulations in the development phase
of a new car. Usually, thousands of simulations are run for only one car to ensure its crash safety over all stages of the
development. Combined with detailed finite element (FE) models, this leads to a high demand of computing power and long
response time for the design engineer. For shorter response times, the automotive industry currently uses huge computer
clusters, which are costly and harmful to the environment. These problems can alternatively be solved by applying model
order reduction (MOR) to the underlying system, i.e., substituting it by a smaller system with preferably low approximation
error.
In structural mechanics, linear model order reduction is applied for a long time and well understood. Small reduction errors
and large acceleration of the simulation can be achieved with, e.g., modal reduction, Krylov methods or techniques based on
the singular value decomposition or Gramian matrices. While this is true for mechanical systems with small deformations, it
is certainly not the case in a crash test simulation with large deformations, nonlinear material behavior and complex contact
scenarios leading to nonlinear differential equations. Unfortunately, nonlinear reduction techniques are not yet as mature and
can be found rarely in industrial applications. Therefore, goals are the improvement of nonlinear reduction techniques in the
field of crash test simulations and the application of linear, mature methods whenever possible.

IMPLEMENTATION

Several ideas presented below are developed and implemented to accelerate car crash simulations. The 2001 Ford Taurus
model [4] of the National Crash Analysis Center and a simplified model of a racing kart serve as examples.

Identification of Nonlinear Parts

Instead of using nonlinear MOR for the complete car model, it is beneficial to separate it in parts which can be consid-
ered to behave linear and parts considered to behave nonlinear. Linear respectively nonlinear methods can then be applied
accordingly, cf. [3]. It is also possible to not reduce the nonlinear part at all to ensure correctness of the simulation. Since
our workflow should be easily applicable in the industry, we use the widely-used FE program LS-DYNA to simulate the
crash. Unfortunately, it is not only feature-rich but closed-source, therefore, the underlying, nonlinear differential equations
are not visible to the user. Thus, only heuristic identification remains. In [1], clustering algorithms are used to identify similar
behaving parts of the car within a set of simulation runs. This approach is adopted to our use case and improved after some
problems are identified. Exemplarily, a cluster crossmember of a frontal crashed Ford Taurus is depicted in Fig. 1. The green
area behaves ”probably linear” whereas the rest of the crossmember in red behaves ”probably nonlinear”.

Model Order Reduction with Interface Reduction

Once the model is separated in two parts as described above, the substructuring needs to be represented in the equations
of motion to allow an isolated treatment of each subbody. Since several decades, the Component Mode Synthesis (CMS) with
the Craig-Bampton method as its well-known special case is the default substructuring approach. CMS assumes a partition of
the degrees of freedom (DOFs) in boundary and internal DOFs and uses so-called component modes as ansatz functions for
the model order reduction. Craig-Bampton, for example, uses a combination of fixed-interface eigenmodes, i.e., the solutions
to the eigenproblem of the internal dynamics (the system restricted to only the internal DOFs) and static condensation modes,
which are resulting from deformations on only one boundary DOF each.
∗ Corresponding author. Email: joerg.fehr@itm.uni-stuttgart.de
 An improvement of the Craig-Bampton method called CMS-Gram consists in replacing the fixed-interface modes by
ansatz functions resulting from input-output based reduction schemes like the Proper Orthogonal Decomposition, Krylov
methods or Balanced Truncation. Though this leads to an improvement in the convergence rate of the approximation error,
it still does not suffice due to the high number of interface nodes since each interface DOF leads to one static condensation
mode. The interface can then be reduced by a spectral decomposition, i.e., taking only the most significant modes into account
or by taking dominant deformation patters after an initial analysis of the model. All these methods are implemented in our
in-house reduction program Morembs1 .
There are a vast selection of nonlinear MOR methods available, including POD-DEIM and its variants, hyperreduction
with GNAT and local basis, Energy-Conserving Sampling and Weighting (ECSW), Trajectory Piecewise Linear (TPWL), etc.
So far, we gained experience with the first two methods in other projects. Unfortunately, they are not directly applicable to
LS-DYNA models since they need access to the underlying differential equation and sometimes even to the solver. In order
to overcome this problem, a co-simulation of the reduced model with a user-defined function in LS-DYNA is one possible
solution.

Results and Outlook

CMS-Gram enhanced with interface reduction is applied to a simplified kart model in [3] for a frontal crash scenario
against a rigid pole. The model is simple enough to choose the separation manually according to plastic deformation after a
few unreduced simulations, though an automatic detection is possible, too. The complete workflow consisting of the prepara-
tion of LS-DYNA input files for unreduced and reduced simulations, model reduction with CMS-Gram, interface reduction,
exchanging binary files with LS-DYNA and error analysis is implemented in the Matlab version of Morembs.
An initial frequency domain analysis shows that the type of interface reduction dominates the reduction error. All methods,
however, lead to small errors while resulting in a small system size with the exception of Craig-Bampton. Therefore, the
interface reduced models are used in the nonlinear car crash simulation yielding to a reduced system which is still consistent
with the original one. In Fig. 2, the deformed model and maximum plastic strain of the reduced, nonlinear kart model is
depicted. The deformation behavior and maximum plastic strain is very similar to the original system. While it was expected
that the Craig-Bampton method leads to a small time step and thus long simulation time, the computational effort of the other
reduction methods also doesn’t improve as expected from other projects.
One area of improvement is obviously the exploitation of the theoretically possible speedup, which is not yet achieved in
combination with LS-DYNA. In order to scale the workflow to the full car model, there also needs to be some improvement in
the code. Currently, the nonlinear behaving part is not reduced with LS-DYNA. Therefore, nonlinear reduction schemes can
be used with a restriction to those which can be implemented for proprietary simulation software used in the industry.

mean relative scatter

0.1045
0.3076

Figure 1: Crossmember clustered in ”probably linear” Figure 2: Deformed kart frame after crash against a pole
(green) and ”probably nonlinear” (red) parts. with highlighted plastic strain.

References
[1] B. Bohn, J. Garcke, R. Iza-Teran, A. Paprotny, B. Peherstorfer, U. Schepsmeier, and C.-A. Thole. Analysis of car crash simulation data with nonlinear
machine learning methods. Procedia Computer Science, 18:621–630, 2013.
[2] J. Fehr and D. Grunert. Model reduction and clustering techniques for crash simulations. Proceedings in Applied Mathematics and Mechanics,
15(1):125–126, 2015.
[3] J. Fehr, P. Holzwarth, and P. Eberhard. Interface and model reduction for efficient simulations of nonlinear vehicle crash models. Submitted to
Mathematical and Computer Modelling of Dynamical Systems, 2015.
[4] D. Marzougui, R. R. Samaha, C. Cui, and C.-D. S. Kan. Extended validation of the finite element model for the 2001 ford taurus passenger sedan.
Technical Report NCAC 2012-W-004, The National Crash Analysis Center, The George Washington University, 45085 University Drive, Ashburn, VA
20147 USA, July 2012.

1 http://www.itm.uni-stuttgart.de/research/model_reduction/MOREMBS_en.php