For further information contact: Joseph Canova Vice President Engineering Dynamics Corp. (503) 644-4500 FAX: (503) 526-0905

3-D Damage Visualization Now Possible

BEAVERTON, OR — November 15, 1998 — Safety researchers can now visualize 3-D vehicle damage as it is calculated during collision or rollover simulations. Using the HVE simulation environment, researchers can compare simulated damage profiles against actual damage from staged collisions or real world crashes as a means to evaluate the validity of their simulation results.

Damage from simulated crashes is visualized directly from the calculations of the EDSMAC4 collision algorithm. Damage from simulated rollovers is visualized from the calculations of the EDVSM vehicle dynamics model. Detailed analysis of the damage can be visualized at each time step using HVE's Damage Profile 3-D viewer. Because the body mesh typically includes several thousand nodes, HVE is capable of displaying the resulting damage in great detail. Such capabilities have previously been available only in finite element analysis requiring numerous hours of computation time. An important benefit of HVE is the ability to simulate vehicle damage in seconds.

Safety researchers can use HVE to investigate real world issues related to highway safety. An entire crash sequence can be simulated to study issues including driver control, crashworthiness and effectiveness of guardrails and barriers. HVE can also be used as a cost-effective method for performing simulated crash tests before expensive experiments are conducted.

Trademarks: HVE, EDSMAC4 and EDVSM are trademarks of Engineering Dynamics Corporation