3. Structure-oriented modeling of assemblies

In the early 1990s, the European Community financed an IMT (Industrial Materials and Technologies) framework program in the field of aircraft structure crashes. One of the phases of this program concerned the evaluation of the various existing calculation codes on sub-structural crash cases. Various topics were addressed, such as the influence of strain rate, mesh fineness, geometric approximations and link representation on simulations. It turned out that the problem that remained unresolved at the end of the program was that of bond modeling. The various approaches adopted for connection modeling were based on the use of