Freelander - Crash Testing
Crash Testing with Virtual Reality
At Land Rover's 900 acre Gaydon test and proving complex is a futuristic looking 4-storey building with aluminium panel cladding and vast expanses of glazing. The design and Engineering centre, completed in 1996, was purpose-designed to foster the talents of some of the finest engineers in the industry.
In developing Freelander, and all the latest-generation Land Rover vehicles, the engineers have phenomenally powerful tools at their disposal. The Vehicle Crash Simulation team have computers and software that produce a near 'virtual reality' in their 3-D modelling capability. The system can break down a complete vehicle design, together with an occupant dummy, into 120,000 elements; for every element, it performs a calculation of stress in a particular crash situation.
Every millionth of a second
A crash is over in less than one tenth of a second; the system is so powerful that it can calculate impact stresses every millionth of a second of the simulated crash, giving hair-splitting detail and accuracy. Every single component as well as the whole vehicle can be animated, examined from any angle, and viewed inside as easily as from outside; layer after layer can be peeled away like the skin of an onion.
More than 400 of these 'virtual' crashes were performed for Freelander before a prototype was launched at the barrier. After each simulation, the resulting data was sent for processing to a Cray supercomputer; so monumental was the volume of data that it took even this electronic giant a total of 30 hours to do the number crunching for each simulation.
The Benefits
- State-of-the-art resources for designing-in Freelander safety
