You guys are experts in finding any car related material, so i got to ask you guys a favour, i need to find some information on how Ford use this program called Nastran to simulate the crashing of the Ford GT's chassis, i have been googling for days and i can't find anything solid enough or detail enough to use in my report. Any help is appreciated guys

Well...exactly what is your assignment?

Hey mate, for my assignment, i have to discuss the use of MSC.NASTRAN and MSC.MARC for vehicle crash analysis and compare it to MSC.DYTRAN. I did some searching on the net and found out Ford uses NASTRAN to simulate crash tests when they were developing the Ford GT. I want to use that example in my discussion but there aren't enough info for me to write much about it.

Cool. I'll see if I can find something that'll help you out.

The original NASTRAN code is by NASA. It is really old stuff, something like fourty years ago. Now a day, there are different versions of NASTRAN , MD NASTRAN, MSC NASTRAN, NX NASTRAN etc. It can be embedded in a CAE program( Like NX NASTRAN ), or as a stand alone solver that needs to import geometry or finite element mesh files.

Thanks mate, i am learning how to use MSC Patran and Marc. I must say it took me a while to get my head around all these sub menus and settings. It is not the most user friendly software as well. espically with that limited undo function. From what i have read, Dytran is used for short duration, extreme structural deformation, while Nastran is used for undeformed structural analysis, is that right?