Alignment of highly resolved time-dependent experimental and simulated crash test data

We investigate for car and component crash tests the comparison of highly resolved experimental data with corresponding simulation data. Due to recent advances for optical measurement systems, one can nowadays obtain surface measurement data from a real crash experiment with high resolution in space and time. These advances call for new data processing methods that allow an alignment of this experimental data with numerical simulation results. We propose an approach based on a data representation stemming from a discrete Laplace–Beltrami operator, which allows such an alignment as well as a joint visual comparative analysis of both data sources. The method enables the identification of the best corresponding simulation among several numerical results, which also allows inferring physical quantities that cannot be measured in experiments. We evaluate the procedure on synthetic and real experimental data from two different crashworthiness setups.