Virtual Product Development with an SDM System Demonstrated by Playing with LEGO® Car Models as Examples

Given that in our professional lives we are dealing with highly sophisticated crash models on a daily basis, it seems obvious that we instantly thought we should be able to simulate a crash of a LEGO® Technic Porsche Model using an explicit crash solver after seeing a video of a physical crash of this model on YouTube [1]. However, it turns out that setting up a simulation project for such a model with its thousands of parts is quite challenging and needs to be done in a very structured way. Therefore, we decided to use this crash simulation as a benchmark for our simulation data management (SDM) solution.

Setting up a comprehensive continuous CAEprocess is a complex task. It usually involves managing the requirements for the desired product, working with CAD data to create a virtual prototype, meshing the geometry for preparing the finite element analysis, dealing with a multitude of sparse CAE solver files to create actual simulation runs, submitting jobs to the HPC or cloud for solving and subsequent monitoring of the simulation runs, handling the result files, deriving key-results, and finally creating reports for the simulations. For realworld car development projects, where hundreds of experts must work and collaborate in such a process, this can be an overwhelming task.

To showcase the basic principles of how such a workflow could look, we created an example using LEGO® car models.