Safety Design Expands from Cars to Aircraft

By DE Editors

September 18, 2007 — The benefits of MADMYO, crash-analysis software that has been successful in occupant safety design in the automotive sector, is being introduced to aviation professionals who use simulation software for virtual testing and virtual certification.

MADMYO offers both speed and accuracy in simulations that have enabled car manufacturers and their suppliers to minimize the number of expensive full-scale physical crash-lab tests required in the development of new cars and safety equipment. In aviation, certification for passenger seat and harness design is currently based largely on physical testing. The sled tests and dummies involved are similar to those used in the automotive sector, however, and MADYMO has been readily adapted to provide a powerful simulation environment for virtual seat and harness models.

A series of workshops organized by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) focus on the use of MADYMO, which is developed by TASS, a company with more than 30 years of crash test and vehicle safety experience. The workshop series, developed to explain the use of a new FAA-sponsored MADYMO graphical interface module (GUI) that has been specifically structured to model aviation seats, provides attendees with a working copy of MADYMO, complete with technical support, and encouraged to work through tutorial exercises. This new GUI module allows non-specialists to easily modify a generic seat model to reflect actual seat design.

For details, contact TASS.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company's website.