Crashworthiness Simulation Using Coupled Meshfree/Finite Element Formulations in LS-DYNA

This paper demonstrates applications of a coupled meshfree/finite element solver of LS-DYNA in the analysis of crashworthiness components. Two examples are employed in the study. The first one is a European side impact dummy component test problem. It is used to show the robustness of the coupled meshfree/finite element solver in handling large deformation since the finite element analysis of this problem fails due to numerical instability caused by negative element volume. By applying the meshfree formulation to the large distortion area, we successfully complete the simulation and obtain very reasonable solutions. The second problem is an engine cradle drop tower test. Various background meshes are created for this problem to study the effect of different element connectivity on accuracy of the meshfree solutions. The study shows that, with the same particle distributions the meshfree analysis yields more consistent solutions than the finite element analysis when the background connectivity varies.