OpenRadioss™ Users' Day 2024

Elham Sahraei | Associate Professor & Director of Electric Vehicle Safety Lab, Temple University

Elham Sahraei is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Temple University. 
She is the director of Electric Vehicle Safety Lab (EVSL). Her research is focused on mechanical safety of lithium-ion batteries under extreme loading conditions. Her current research is sponsored by automotive industry, FE software companies, state programs and Office of Naval Research. Prior to Temple, Dr. Sahraei was a Research Scientist at the Impact and Crashworthiness Lab of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the co-director of the MIT Battery Consortium, a multi-sponsor industrial program supported by major automotive and battery manufacturers. Such as Mercedes Benz R&D North America, PSA Group, Jaguar Land-Rover, AVL, MuRata, LG Chem, and Boston Power. She has also been a co-investigator of multiple Ford-MIT Alliance projects, and a DOE project with National Renewable Energy Lab on safety of Li-Ion batteries. She earned her PhD degree from the George Washington University, her Masters from Sharif University of Technology, and her BSc from Isfahan University of Technology, and completed two years of post-doctoral training at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she became a Research Scientist afterwards. Besides characterization and modeling of Li-Ion batteries, her expertise includes full-scale vehicle crash analysis, occupant protection, and analysis of roadside safety structures.

Paul A. Du Bois | Crashworthiness Analysis, Independent Engineer

Paul A. Du Bois was born in Kortrijk, Belgium in 1956 and became a civil engineer at the university of Gent, Belgium in 1979. From 1980 till 1987 he worked as a project and senior engineer at ESI in Eschborn, Germany where he was one of the original developers of PAMCRASH and pioneered the application of numerical simulations to automotive crash problems. He works as an independent consultant in the field of industrial numerical simulations since september 1987.

Paul specializes in the application of explicit time integration techniques to dynamical phenomena such as crash and impact problems. Most of the world’s automotive assemblers such as Mercedes-Benz, Chrysler, Honda, Toyota, Ford, GM, Volvo, Tesla and others figure on his list of customers. For the German automotive research organisation FAT, he consulted to the working groups ’side impact dummies’ (1992-1997) and ’Foam’ (1996-today).

Since 2004 Paul also consulted with NASA and has worked for the Space shuttle’s ’return to flight’ program, amongst other projects. Since 2006 Paul has continuously consulted on the FAA's catastrophic engine failure program.  Apart from methods development work he has also trained hundreds of young engineers and his 4 day class 'crashworthiness and impact simulations with LS-DYNA’ has been a standard with several LS-DYNA distributors worldwide since 1992. The course is offered in collaboration with Suri Bala since 2017.

Dr. Axel Haenschke | Project Manager, CAE & Simulation, CPS Consulting

Dr. Axel Haenschke received his professional studies at TU Braunschweig, Vehicle Dynamics and Structural Layout PhD 1989, Subject „Computer Aided Vehicle Structure Layout”, at TU Berlin.
He has 5 years experiences in VW Gedas, Berlin, Manager CAE-Projects, more than 25 years of experience at Ford Werke GmbH, Köln, and several  management positions as a Technical Specialist Body Structures & Vehicle Safety.

He was responsible for Vehicle Conceptual Development all European Platforms (Ka, Fiesta, Focus & Transit), Supervisor Safety Small Vehicles (Fiesta, Focus), Supervisor Analytical Prototypes, CAE Integration and CAE Model build. Responsible for all “Virtual Prototypes”, Ford representative at the German Automotive Research Association "Forschungsgesellschaft Automobiltechnik" (FAT) and Head of the Working Group 27 (AK 27) "Simulation Methods and Virtual Validation". 

He is additionally a leader of the Research Cluster "Lightweight Design, Joining Techniques and Simulation" at the FAT, Steering Team Member of the international CAE Conference "Automotive CAE Grand Challenge", University Teaching Position at "Technischen Universität Berlin" at " Institute of Land and Maritime Transport - Automotive Engineering" for the Lecture: „Die Pkw-Karosserie und ihr Entwurf“ (Vehicle Body and Structure Layout), up to Winter Semester 2013.

He started at CPS Consulting, December 2019 as Head of Business Development for Simulation projects and Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE).