Honda Improves Its CAE Capability

Although the people at Honda R&D Americas, by and large, work on vehicle development, they recently went to work on developing visualization software for crash test simulation. They worked with developers from software company 3DXCITE (rtt.ag), which is the developer of 3D visualization software known as DELTAGEN.

What they did was work so that the visualization software was integrated with the LS-DYNA (lstc.com) non-linear crash simulation software, which Honda has been using since 1998, so that the output would provide vehicle developers with a highly realistic rendering of the crash consequences.

With the software, Honda engineers can manipulate the rendering, rotate the view as required, strip away parts of the vehicle to look at a section or component, make the crash barrier transparent, and change point-of-view of the event. The simulation data is rendered in real-time on a Quadro graphics workstation from NVIDIA (nvidia.com).

Eric DeHoff, Technical Leader for CAE in the Crash Safety Group of Honda R&D Americas, said, “With this technology, we have gained the potential to improve the quality of decision making and reduce the time required for finalizing a vehicle design by greatly increasing the ease of communicating and understanding the results of a crash test simulation.” He added, “This tool will promote a more complete understanding of vehicle safety design among all engineers involved in our vehicle development process.”