An Open Letter to the Radioss Community
Industrial car crash simulations emerged in the mid 80th driven by a small community of talented enthusiasts that rapidly perceived the huge benefit to replace physical testing by computer simulations. For instance, the first, worldwide, car to car crash simulation was run with Radioss in 1991.
With progress made on computer science, usage democratized and 30 years later, legacy codes like Radioss are extensively used for crash and impact in many industries, including automotive, defense, aerospace, railway, but also electronics and consumer goods, biomechanics…
At the same time, industry is facing rapid transformations, largely driven by the urgency of combating climate change, especially in personal and urban transportations with electric and autonomous vehicles.
Given this fast-changing landscape, closed crash code development has become a barrier for innovation and can no longer keep up with the pace of transformation of vehicles on the ground, with multidisciplinary challenges like battery pack safety, increased usage of massive parts in aluminum or composite materials, with safety regulation quickly evolving, taking into account autonomous vehicles and advancement in human modelling for better injury prediction.
To help accelerating advancements on transportation safety, Altair is taking the unprecedented step to open source our industry proven crash code Radioss.
We aim to build a broad and active community, including research and educational institutions, OEMs in automotive, aerospace & railway, safety regulation organizations, to tackle these rapidly evolving challenges.
We trust such collaboration between industry, research and development will be the key enabler to foster multidisciplinary and innovative solutions while relying on the development team’s expertise for keeping a high level of software quality, robustness and performance.
Let’s work together to make the world a safer place!
Eric Lequiniou