Force flux visualization with force tubes

During a car collision, each component of the car body is stressed in a different manner. Some parts absorb very high forces, while others transfer the forces to the passenger cell. Determining the structural components – which guide the main forces – enables the engineer to design car components with an optimal crash behavior. Since the longitudinal structures within the front part of a car body play an important role in increasing the body's ability to absorb forces in a frontal crash, we must detect and understand the force progression within these components.
In order to calculate the forces that act inside a car component, section force calculations are performed. Our application crashViewer allows the interactive definition of trace lines along longitudinal structures. Then, section planes are calculated which are positioned orthogonal to the trace line with a specified distance to each other. The intersected elements are efficiently determined using a bounding volume hierarchy. The section force for those elements are computed and accumulated for each section. The vector component of the resulting accumulated force vector parallel to the section plane's normal is mapped to the color and the partial diameter of a generated tubular object.