I-Corps: New Approach for Virtual Prototyping and Computer-Aided Engineering

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The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project will be significant because of the anticipated effect on improving product quality and safety for a large number of industry sectors. The project will lead to more reliance on virtual prototyping and less reliance on the costly and time consuming actual prototyping and experimental testing. Advanced virtual prototyping will result in more credible accident investigation reports and safety and operation guidelines, and will allow experimenting easily with innovative design configurations and for significant reduction in maintenance cost in many engineering areas, including transportation. Reliance on a single-software technology will eliminate the incompatibilities of existing computer-aided engineering (CAE) systems, improve communications, and produce a healthier work environment.This I-Corps project aims at addressing serious incompatibility issues attributed to the use of multiple computer-aided engineering (CAE) software systems developed using fundamentally different approaches. It is the main goal of this project to address this problem by using a new mechanics-based CAE framework in order to eliminate the incompatibilities and allow for developing models with unprecedented levels of accuracy and details. To this end, the finite element (FE) absolute nodal coordinate formulation (ANCF) will be used to seamlessly integrate the computer-aided design (CAD) and analysis processes by using one approach to create a unified geometry/FE analysis mesh and perform the multibody system (MBS) dynamic simulations. ANCF finite elements can be used to define a geometry that is invariant under an orthogonal coordinate transformation. In addition to describing the geometry accurately and performing the analysis efficiently, ANCF elements lead to an optimum sparse matrix structure for the dynamic equations of motion, leading to the development of new computational procedures that will drastically change the design process and eliminate the need for using multiple-software system.