An iconic Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) computer code that has saved the automobile industry billions of dollars is the focus for the newest episode of the Big Ideas Lab Podcast. Listen on Apple or Spotify.
Nearly 50 years ago in 1976, a then-LLNL mechanical engineer named John Hallquist wrote a small, 5,000-line program known as DYNA3D to help supercomputers analyze the structures of bombs dropped from the B-1 aircraft. The code modeled stress traveling through structures.
No one ever could have expected the big things that have come from DYNA3D.
Automakers use it in crash simulations. Beer manufacturers have run the code to design cans. Surgeons have used it to understand how fluid flows through the heart. Jet engine manufacturers have utilized it to certify modifications to engines and to model bird strikes.
At times, it has been utilized by 300 users, including eighteen aerospace companies, nine atomic energy firms, thirteen automakers, thirty-seven research labs and twenty-five engineering corporations. The user list has been a "Who's Who of global industry: General Motors, Alcoa, General Electric, Mercedes-Benz are but a few of its devotees over time.
A 1993 study found that DYNA3D and its successor programs save American industry about $350 million each year. As one aerospace engineer interviewed for the study put it: "DYNA is what Hershey is to chocolate bars and Kleenex is to tissue. People don't ask for a (dynamic) finite element code; they ask for the 'DYNA-like' code."
"The unique feature of DYNA3D is that it is able in three dimensions to model the folding collapsing of metal structures on themselves," said Roger Werne, who served as a senior adviser in the Lab's Innovation and Partnerships Office until his retirement in September.
"It saved the automobile industry billions of dollars per year. They no longer had to do many, many real full-time crashes. They could model the crash on a computer, do the changes they needed in order to strengthen the auto structure and then do a final test crash to validate the models that they had developed."
In the podcast, Werne lauds the work of Hallquist, who went on to start his own software company, saying, "John was by far the most productive and creative software engineer that I've ever seen."
Tune in to the latest episode of the Big Ideas Podcast and learn more about DYNA3D, the Livermore computer code that has served as a workhorse for American industry for nearly five decades. Listen on Apple or Spotify.
