Visualization of Crash-Worthiness Simulations

One of the main goals in the development of a new car is the achievement of an optimal crash-worthiness using as many analytical tools as possible and minimizing hardware-prototype testing. During the last few years, the absolute simulation time for modeling, computing and investigating a complete crash model has been reduced significantly. However, a shift of the proportions can be noticed between the time required for preprocessing, computation and postprocessing respectively. The postprocessing stage turned out to become the most time consuming activity performed by the simulation engineers. These changes and the rapid development of computer graphics technology during the last few years has increased the need for new visualization techniques to facilitate the analysis of crash-worthiness simulations.

Our recent research has covered the following topics:

• Effective scene graph design


• Efficient visualization of physical and structural properties using texture mapping


• Vector visualization using animated textures


• Force flux visualization with force tubes


• Rendering acceleration by mesh optimization (QuadStrip/Simplification)


• Hierarchical subdivision of finite element models


• Selectively hiding geometry using RGBα texture maps