Studies of Adaptive Finite Element Method for Component Crashworthiness Analysis

Crashworthiness analysis involves highly nonlinear transient dynamic problems with large deformation of thin shell structures, elastic-plasticity, surface contact, etc. Accuracy, robustness and efficiency are always the fundamental requirements for engineering applications. Adaptive methods of finite element analysis are considered powerful tools for many engineering applications, to obtain good accuracy efficiently.

This paper is to report a preliminary study on the application of h-adaptivity to crashworthiness analysis using LS-DYNA. The performance of the component axial crash simulation using adaptive method is presented with comparisons to uniform refinement. The roles and effects of the control parameters of the software are discussed.

It is found that the error indicator based on shell element normal rotation is effective for the solutions of bending dominated crashworthiness applications. The adaptive refinement occurs in the large deformation area and the results are comparable to those obtained by using uniform mesh of the same level of refinement, with much less cpu time.