Alignment of highly resolved time-dependent experimental and simulated crash test data

Abstract

We investigate for car and component crash tests the comparison of highly resolved experimental data with corresponding simulation data. Due to recent advances for optical measurement systems, one can nowadays obtain surface measurement data from a real crash experiment with high resolution in space and time. These advances call for new data processing methods that allow an alignment of this experimental data with numerical simulation results. We propose an approach based on a data representation stemming from a discrete Laplace–Beltrami operator, which allows such an alignment as well as a joint visual comparative analysis of both data sources. The method enables the identification of the best corresponding simulation among several numerical results, which also allows inferring physical quantities that cannot be measured in experiments. We evaluate the procedure on synthetic and real experimental data from two different crashworthiness setups.

Keywords:

• CAE analysis
• alignment of experiment and simulation
• temporal coherence
• embedded deformation

Acknowledgements

This work was developed in the Fraunhofer project ‘Horus – Hochgeschwindigkeits-3D-Messdatenerfassung zur Validierung von Experiment und Simulation in der Crashbewertung’. We thank our colleagues from the Fraunhofer institutes IOF and EMI for the experimental setup and data as well as the corresponding simulation model. We cordially thank Nikhil Prabakaran for initial experiments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.