OpenRadioss — The Complete Guide: Free Industrial-Grade Crash, Impact and Blast Simulation
OpenRadioss is the open version of the Radioss solver, used for years in the automotive and defence industries for crash simulation. Altair released it as open source (AGPL-3.0), and since Siemens acquired Altair it is presented as the open-source version of Simcenter Radioss.
OpenRadioss
Altair (part of Siemens)
Explicit FEA for crash, impact and blast analysis — industrial grade, open source.
Get it from the vendorWhat you get
- Explicit solver — for millisecond events: crash, impact, blast and drop.
- Nonlinear materials — including high strain-rate effects.
- Contact and failure — contact between bodies, fracture and cracking.
- Input formats — the native Radioss format, and LS-DYNA keyword files as well.
- Parallel computing — MPI and OpenMP, on Linux and Windows.
What to know
OpenRadioss is a solver — not a full graphical environment. You prepare the model in an external pre-processor, then convert the results to VTK and view them in ParaView. The best way to start is with the official examples. A reliable model takes experience in material calibration and meshing.
Related tools
For a smaller, simpler explicit solver to learn on — Impact. For meshing — Gmsh. For implicit static and dynamic analysis — CalculiX.
Impact FEM
Impact FEM Project
An explicit dynamic finite-element solver for impact and crash problems.
Get it from the vendor
ParaView
Kitware / Sandia / Los Alamos
Large-scale simulation post-processing — slices, streamlines and animation.
Get it from the vendor
Gmsh
Gmsh Project
FEA mesh generator with built-in geometry and scripting — standard infrastructure for open numerical work.
Get it from the vendor
CalculiX
CalculiX Project
Open-source FEA with syntax close to Abaqus. The solver behind the FreeCAD FEM workbench.
Get it from the vendorThe bottom line
OpenRadioss brings industrial-grade crash and impact analysis to every engineer and student — completely free, including for commercial work.