Structural adhesives are widely used across the automotive industry for several reasons like scale-up of structural performance and enabling multi-material and lightweight designs.
Nowadays for crash simulation with the explicit Finite Element Method (FEM), several simulation tools are in use for the thin layer of structural adhesives in crash loaded structures (e.g. solid element methods, beam type spring methods; several material models), but all of them show either deficits in accuracy or in computation time.
Therefore a new simulation tool for the explicit FEM has been developed. This approach uses a user-defined contact definition for the modeling of the adhesive. It enables a user-friendly and time-efficient modeling of adhesives without using elements for the adhesives. The new method has been integrated into the commercial software tool RADIOSS and was implemented on the Ford supercomputer cluster. A systematic validation procedure from specimen to full car application level has been performed, which demonstrates the capability of the new method.
In this paper first the need for a new simulation method for full car crash simulation will be explained. Then the material behavior and the current status of crash simulation of structural adhesives will be shown. In the next steps the details of the new simulation approach and the details of the systematic validation procedure including the comparison of test and simulation results from specimen to full car level will be presented.