An isogeometric approach to streamlining high-end structural dynamics simulation for automotive and other applications

Developers in automotive, defense, and related industries seek to run computer simulations on new designs to ensure accuracy, assess failings, and predetermine fatal and non-fatal errors; however, setting up and running these simulations is extraordinarily complex and correspondingly expensive. Even today’s best methods for high-profile problems, like simulating automotive crashes, require millions of dollars of manual labor to set up each simulation. These current methods are so expensive because they require translating each Computer-Aided Design (CAD) model to a Finite Element Analysis (FEA) model prior to simulation. This translation process is time-consuming, tedious, and frustrating even for seasoned veterans. In the end, after the analysis model is so laboriously constructed, it often fails to perform robustly and instead produces low-fidelity or erroneous results, and then serves limited use in improving the design. The company has extensive domain experience that enables them to deliver fundamentally new approaches to CAD and FEA, wrapped in a novel, high-performance computing (HPC) framework. The revolutionary technology developed through this SBIR allows CAD data to be transformed into an analysis-suitable state far more quickly than traditional approaches allow. It also promises to accelerate simulations times by up to 500x and return more accurate results, to better inform design improvements. The approach will deliver scalable solutions through an intuitive and simple-to-use interface, Coreform IGA. The team has previously founded, grown and exited a company in this space and is well prepared to bring the products to success. In Phase II, the patent-pending isogeometric analysis (IGA) technology was significantly matured and demonstrated promising simulation results. The Coreform IGA software was released. The team gained insight from potential customers in the automotive and defense industries regarding the most impactful entry point into their workflows, helping to define Phase IIB. The team will work closely with two global customers who are contributing matching funds to this project. We will mature Coreform IGA to be ready for production at their sites in year one and expand into other customers’ sites in year two. The team will mature the patent-pending IGA technology, expand the range of physics available, and enhance the technology to fully leverage HPC. Customer-proposed benchmark problems will be used at all stages to verify the approach. The proposed methodology will remove error-prone parts of the simulation workflow and improve simulation fidelity, simplifying the user experience and allowing engineers of all experience levels to run analyses. This work translates into accurate data, betters outcomes and savings of millions of dollars per project. The final toolset will provide accurate designs across multiple industries and reduce time to market with considerable cost savings.