Crash simulation evolution and its impact on R&D in the automotive applications

International Journal of Product Development

Volumn 8, Issue 3, 2009, Pages 291-305

  Spethmann, Philipp ^a   Herstatt, Cornelius ^a   Thomke, Stefan H ^b  

^a HAMBURG UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY   (Germany)

^b HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

crash tests; product innovation; technology management; virtual simulation tool

Indexed keywords

EID: 79959836091     PISSN: 14779056     EISSN: 17418178     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1504/IJPD.2009.024202     Document Type: Article

References (41)

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26. Thomke, S.H. (2003) Experimentation Matters, Harvard Business School Press, Boston.
27. VP&S Vehicle Simulation (2004) The New Opel Astra Crash Simulation Model, Opel AG, Rüsselsheim, Germany (unpublished).
28. Crashworthiness is a term describing the ability of a vehicle to protect its occupants in survivable crashes.
29. For European consumers, safety (together with reliability of the car) is the most important aspect when buying a new car (Euro NCAP/MORI, 2005).
30. NCAP is the abbreviation of ‘New Car Assessment Program’. Euro-NCAP is the consumer test for the European market.
31. ‘Problem-solving’ measures the ability to solve problems (in R&D) by means of the current state of technology.
32. These two interviewees from MIT were chosen due to their extensive knowledge of crash simulations and the FEM, and their local proximity to the authors.
33. The number of elements determines the granularity of the model. Additionally, other important factors are the quality of the elements and the description of the interactions of the elements (mesh quality) (Khalil and Du Bois, 2004).
34. The FAT was founded in 1983 and included all seven German automotive assemblers: Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen, BMW, Porsche, Audi, Opel and Ford of Germany.
35. To the FAT’s project similar approaches at that time were, e.g. Benson and Hallquist, 1986; Chedmail et al., 1986; Nilsson, 1989.
36. In fact, hitherto engineers working on virtual simulations were often regarded as scientists conducting a ‘virtual adventure’ rather than as R&D engineers (Haug et al., 1986; Khalil and Du Bois, 2004).
37. Moore’s Law bases on the famous statement of Intel’s cofounder Gordon Moore in 1965, who predicted that every computer performance-related quantity doubles every 1.5–2 years (Moore, 1965). Thus, the possible performance of, e.g. crash simulations, grows at the same rate.
38. This example is based on a personal communication at Opel, Germany, and on Böttcher et al. (2005).
39. This example is based on a personal communication by Professor Bathe from MIT in October 2005.
40. Often R&D engineers have to run some inaugurational simulations in order to calibrate the crash model.
41. Or, how a R&D engineer from a major German OEM put it: ‘Wir sind immer so, dass nichts mehr geht’.