Initial Penetration Removal

Individual meshing of vehicle-modelling-data of the CAD-world into a finite element mesh often leads to initial penetrations at winding flanges. That means two or more polygonal areas, for example each representing a component with defined thickness of plate, are lying spacially that close together that the plates would penetrate because of their thickness.
Consequently in a simulation receiving this vehicle mesh as initial record initial forces would appear falsifying the results. Because of this the calculating engineer endeavours to find such areas where initial penetrations appear and modify the finite elements meshes in a way that all initial penetrations are removed before starting the simulation.

CrashViewer enables the calculating engineer first to calculate the minimal-node-distance and afterwards visualize it in color. In doing so the smallest distance of each node in the whole modell to the meshed areas of the other components is determined. This scalar value existing then at every point is finally mapped via colortable to a texture coordinate, so the minimal node-element-distance can be visualized with the aid of onedimensional RGB-texture in the form of color ribbons.

Regarding the ability to replace finite elements meshes by higher developed variants it is important to be able to restrict the mesh modificaton at initial penetration removal to the newly added variants of components. For this crashViwer offers a selection technique to specify such components whose node coordinates may be moved.

The big picture in the middle shows three adjacend components with the minimal node-element-distance being visualized at their flanges. The color red shows an undershooting of the minimal distance specified before so at this areas inital penetrations occur.
The magnified display details show the flange distance before and after the initial penetration removal.