Summary

The autobench project by the "Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung" (BMBF^[4]) is a combination of several automobile manufacturers (among others BMW^[5]), software companies for simulationsoftware and technologieproviders as the GMD^[6] and the University of Stuttgart^[7]. The aim of this three-year project is to accelerate the design and development of automobiles by using numerical simulation (crash, forming, stability, vibration behaviour, ...) and simultaneously reduce the number of required prototypes. Within the scope of the activity package 3 Crashsimulation the program crashViewer is developed at the institute for computer science, University of Stuttgart, since june 1999 (before University of Erlangen^[8]) under the direction of Prof. Dr. Th. Ertl^[9]. This visualisationtool is created by close cooperation with the department EK-21 (crashsimulation) of the research and enginering center of the BMW Group^[10] and is already in practical use here at the pre- as well as the postprocessing.

The crashviewer is written completely in C⁺⁺ and is based on the graphic APIs Cosmo3D and OpenGL/Optimizer^[11]. Using the newest technologies and research results it is a most powerfull threedimensional tool mastering among others^[12] the following tasks:

Preprocessing:

• Distance Visualisation^[13]
• Visualization of Potential Flanges^[14]
• Selective Removal of Initial Penetrations^[15]
• Setting, Changing and Validating Welding Points^[16]

_{currently at research:}
• Replacement of Components
• Setting, Changing and Validating Weldseams and Bonds

Postprocessing:

• Visualization of Complete Carcrashs^[17]
• Mapping of Parameters^[18]
• Calculation and Visualization of Forcefluxtubes^[19]
• Comparing Analysis of Variants^[20]
• Stability Tests^[21]

Integration and Cooperative Work:

• Datatransmission via CORBA-interface
• Java-based Control out of the Webbrowser
• Cooperative Work with crashViewer^[22]