Improvements of highway safety through computational mechanics

Development in computing hardware and software during the past decade promoted new, spectacular research directions in passive safety of drivers, passengers, pedestrians and other users of the road system. Computational mechanics research can now be a very efficient tool for prediction of possible harmful effects of collisions, lose of vehicle’s control, extend of expected injuries during collisions, etc. High performance computing enables exploring endless combinations of vehicle types, speed, impact angles, and analyses of their impact with other vehicles, roadside safety hardware and even pedestrians. Due to its decreasing cost, such research becomes very competitive as compared with full scale crash tests, which dominated highway safety research for the past several decades. In addition, computational mechanics is becoming widely accepted by highway research safety community as a very efficient tool used to aid in the design and support analyses efforts. Current state-of-the-art in the field of numerical analyses of crashes and vehicle trajectories is presented in the paper. Capabilities of high-performance computational mechanics and their limitations are presented and discussed through several specific research examples. Experimental validation techniques of the assumed numerical methods and solution strategies were also studied.