Data Analysis For Parallel Car-Crash Simulation Results
Data Analysis For Parallel Car-Crash Simulation Results
ABSTRACT
The paper discusses automotive crash simulation in a stochastic context, whereby the uncertainties in numerical simulation results generated by parallel computing. Since crash is a non-repeatable phenomenon, qualification for crashworthiness based on a single test is not meaningful, and should be replaced by stochastic simulation. But the stochastic simulations may generate different results on parallel machines, if the same application is executed more than once. For a benchmark car model, differences between the position of a node in two simulation runs of PAMCRASH or LS-DYNA of up to 10 cm were observed, just as a result of round-off differences in the case of parallel computing. In this paper, some data mining algorithms are described to measure the scatter of parallel simulation results of car-crash and then provide hints to overcome this scatter to get more stable car model.
The field of data mining and knowledge discovery is emerging as a new, fundamental research area with important applications to science, engineering, medicine, business, and education. Data mining attempts to formulate, analyze and implement basic induction processes that facilitate the extraction of meaningful information and knowledge from unstructured data. Simulation is now accepted as a third mode of science, supplementing theory and experiment. Today, not only do experiments produce huge data sets, but so do simulations. Data mining, and more generally data intensive computing, is proving to be a critical link between theory, simulation, and experiment.
Fig. 1 shows the maximal and average differences between several simulation runs of PAM-CRASH for a car model consisting of about 60.000 shell elements on a distributed memory parallel machine. In this paper, some practical data mining methods are introduced to measure the amount of the scatter of some parallel crash simulation results, the intention of this work is to find the origin of this scatter then provide hint to overcome this scatter.
Fig. 2 shows a typical F max result for 15 parallel simulation runs of LS-DYNA for the test case of NEON model at time state of 81 ms. The color indicates the scatter of the results at each point. Red areas are those with the largest values.1 The large scatter of the wheel in Fig. 2 is not important for design engineers. More important is the scatter of parts of the fire wall close to the driverss feet shown in Fig. 3. In order to improve the model, it is important to distinguish between local effects and impacts of scatter sources at other places, like the part of the motor carrier also shown in Fig. 3. In order to distinguish source and impact of indeterministic behavior, clustering analysis are introduced into the stability analysis of car-crash simulations.
Fig 3 :Scatter of simulation results on the motor carrier and in the interior.
Therefore this node might be assigned to any of the two reference clusters. In order to reduce these effects, the clustering process is performed twice.
Perform clustering Cluster(N) for this reference time step. Find the center node for each cluster. Perform the second Cluster(N) to check for all related nodes to these center nodes. Sort center nodes by the size of clusters to get a new node sequence.
Clustering algorithm may be very in deterministic and might result in too many clusters. Therefore the clustering process is started again.
Clustering algorithms for simulation data Partitioning clustering for all time steps
The resulting set of clusters from the reference time step is ordered by size and all clusters smaller than Scluster are eliminated. By adjusting the size of threshold Csim and Scluster, a moderate number of clusters can be obtained for the whole car model, for example, the number of clusters Nclusters is dozens.
The algorithm used for crash simulation analysis is performed in the following steps:
(1) Select a reference time step, a minimal cluster size and a threshold. (2) Perform a preclustering for this time step. (3) For each time step. Perform parallel partitioning clustering based on the new node sequences created in Section 3.1. (4) Output.
Two simulation results for the motor carrier are shown in Fig. 7. The form of the motor carrier at the end of the simulation is quite different. The sim cluster function indicates, that this causes the substantial scatter at the fire wall. By analyzing the geometric structure of the part of motor carrier, where the shock absorber pipe puts pressure to at the critical time, we know the indeterministic behavior of parallel crash simulations was from contacting and buckling in some critical cases, see Fig. 8.
Fig. 4. Simcluster as color for CAMAS46 testcase of whole car and the interior at 80 ms.
Fig. 5. Development of the clusters with time (70, 60, 50, 40 ms).
Fig. 6. Simcluster for the motor carrier at time 35 ms (left) and at 28 ms (right) for its inner part.
Our work aims at stable car model. As a result of this analysis, some attempt was done to modify the parts in the areas of the origin of the instability. Here small change was done on the element of the part of motor carrier by changing the thickness, density or node position respectively. As a consequence the scatter of the result due to parallel computing on the fire wall was reduced substantially, which was shown in Fig. 9.
Fig. 7. View on the motor carrier at 80 ms for two extremely different simulation runs.
Fig. 9. Scatter of several variants of the original model showing a substantial improved behavior.