CAE Data Management and Quality Assessment of LS-DYNA Crash Models using V-CESS

The meshing, modeling and evaluation of LS-DYNA crash models for vehicle crash simulations is constantly subjected to an increase in complexity, since the model sizes grow, several vehicle variants are instanced from one single CAE data set and since the number of load cases and the requirements on the evaluation quality are constantly increasing. Current models sometimes contain more than 1000 different components and 1 million elements. In recent years, the model complexity has also been increased since interior parts and dummy models are included. The increased complexity makes it difficult to handle the models since changes in parts in many cases influence many different vehicle variants and load cases. V-CESS is a "Virtual Process Automation Framework" designed to simplify and standardize this type of CAE processes and is developed together with DaimlerChrysler AG, department PBE/DAM [3]. The system was developed in a pilot project with the aim to manage the CAE data of the "Sprinter Successor" in order to create, manage and evaluate crash models in LS-DYNA. In engineering projects together with DaimlerChrysler AG, department PBE/DAM, we have shown that the return on investment of V-CESS is reached at about 1.5 virtual prototypes. The meshing cost can be reduced by 15% and the engineering cost saving is approx. 30%.