Identifying similarities and exceptions in deformations and mesh functions: Comparing many simulation results automatically

The growing complexity in the design space of finite element models and increasing requirements and regulations for crash safety together lead to large development trees in the CAE crashworthiness development process. That is, during the virtual product development numerous design changes are applied and analysed until the final model satisfies given design criteria. The biggest challenge is how to compare several simulation results to detect global events, examples are unexpected deformation behavior or unusual distribution of mesh functions such as plastic strain. We observe a lack of simple to use procedures that analyse and automatically categorize design measures together with their impact on simulation results. To address these challenges, we have developed a workflow to easily analyse the impact of design variations as an important step in the overall simulation data analysis. Our software, called SimExplore, enables an overview over many simulations pointing out their similarities and exceptions in deformations and mesh functions automatically. The capabilities of SimExplore are demonstrated on data from a robustness analysis of a frontal vehicle crash, where the wall thicknesses of several selected components have been varied. Our automated workflow detects different deformation modes and identifies distinctly different behavior.