Altair Radioss | Crash Simulation Software & Explicit Dynamics

Name: What is Altair Radioss?
Uploaded: 2026-02-27
Description: What is Altair Radioss?

Altair Radioss is an industry-leading explicit solver for highly nonlinear, dynamic events, crash, impact, blast, and ballistics. With multiphysics capability and strong scalability, TrueInsight helps you adopt Radioss faster with licensing, onboarding, and engineering-led guidance.

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What is Altair Radioss?

Altair Radioss is a high-performance explicit dynamics simulation tool used to predict how complex structures respond under severe dynamic loading. Engineers rely on it for crash and safety work, high-velocity impact events, and other nonlinear scenarios where material failure, contact, and large deformation matter.

Key Features of Altair Radioss

Industry-Leading Explicit Crash & Impact Simulation

Radioss is widely used to simulate real crash and impact scenarios from full-vehicle crash to high-speed impacts, supporting safety-driven design decisions while reducing reliance on physical prototypes.

Multiphysics for Real Dynamic Events

Model complex real-world events that blend structural response with other physics (and extreme conditions) to capture what happens during transient, high-energy loading and failure scenarios.

Integrated Solver Compatibility

Radioss reduces adoption friction by supporting unique third-party solver compatibility, allowing teams to run external input decks directly minimizing workflow disruption and accelerating time-to-value.

Altair Radioss Capabilities

Crashworthiness & Safety Simulation at Full-System Scale

Radioss is built for crash and safety scenarios where models don’t behave “nicely”, think large deformation, complex contact, and nonlinear materials. It’s a strong fit for full assemblies and safety-critical structures when you need stable, trustworthy results under extreme loading.

Impact and Drop Events with Reliable Contact Behavior

For impact and drop events, Radioss handles fast transients with many interacting parts, friction, and rapid energy transfer. This is where explicit simulation shines: you can evaluate intrusion, peak loads, accelerations, and how failure develops over milliseconds, not just static end states.

Blast and Ballistic Load Cases for Extreme Dynamics

Radioss supports severe transient load cases like blast and ballistics where high strain rates and rapid structural response drive the outcome. It’s a practical choice for designing and validating protective concepts and resilient structures under extreme dynamic conditions.

Advanced Approaches for Complex Interactions

When events involve highly complex interactions, Radioss supports explicit methods commonly used in these domains, including ALE and SPH contexts. That helps teams represent behaviors that go beyond simple solid contact, useful in impact-driven and protective-system studies.

Solver-Deck Compatibility to Reduce Switching Friction

If you’re moving workflows or consolidating tools, Radioss can reduce the pain, teams can often reuse existing solver input decks instead of rebuilding everything. That means faster benchmarking, easier correlation to past baselines, and fewer opportunities for setup mistakes.

Scalability for Faster Turnaround on Big Explicit Models

Explicit jobs can get heavy fast as models grow. Radioss is designed to scale so large crash and impact simulations remain practical, helping you keep iteration speed high and avoid compromising fidelity just to meet runtime constraints.

Expert Radioss Support and Services from TrueInsight

Faster Adoption, Cleaner Models, More Trustworthy Results

TrueInsight doesn’t just provide the Radioss license, we help your team get productive quickly: onboarding, workflow guidance, model setup reviews, and practical best practices for crash simulation software projects. When deadlines are tight, you get direct access to engineers who understand explicit dynamics and what it takes to make results reliable.

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Learn More About Radioss

Simulating the Impact of a Mike Tyson Punch

Radioss can create a detailed model of the human head that includes various tissues, bones, and muscle structures, accurately replicating how they behave under impact. By inputting Tyson’s punch speed and mass, we can simulate a punch’s effect on the head and observe the distribution of forces and resulting strain across the skull and facial bones.

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Blow Molding Simulation with Radioss AMS

Altair Radioss’ Advanced Mass Scaling (AMS) accelerates blow molding simulations while preserving accuracy. Compared to standard methods, AMS cuts CPU time by nearly 3.8x without distorting stress, strain, or energy balance—making it a reliable, efficient solution for complex manufacturing models

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Radioss Users in Action

IDES – Defence Vehicle Module in Record Time

Australian engineering firm IDES used Altair software to design a rollover protection structure (ROPS) for the Army’s G-Wagon surveillance vehicle. By simulating pendulum crash tests virtually, IDES avoided costly prototypes and delivered a robust, life-saving roll cage within strict deadlines. The final design correlated strongly

Arcimoto – Safe Fun Utility Vehicle (FUV)

Arcimoto leveraged Altair software to design its electric three-wheeled Fun Utility Vehicle. Simulations of roof crush, roll cage, and swing-arm performance allowed the team to validate safety-critical structures quickly and affordably. The result: a 230 MPGe commuter vehicle combining motorcycle fun with automotive protection, developed under tight startup constraints.

Outstanding Scalability at NIAR

The National Institute for Aviation Research (NIAR) validated Altair Radioss’ scalability on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Using multi-domain crash simulations, Radioss delivered twice the speed of leading competitors and maintained repeatability across hundreds of cores. This breakthrough enables faster aerospace R&D cycles and more efficient use of HPC resources.

Frequently Asked Questions

Radioss is used for explicit dynamics simulation, especially crash, impact, drop tests, blast, and ballistic events where large deformation, complex contact, and failure behavior happen in milliseconds and must be captured realistically.

Radioss is the explicit dynamics solver behind many crash and impact workflows. In practice, teams refer to it as crash simulation software because it’s the engine running the physics for crashworthiness and safety studies.

Choose Radioss when the event is highly nonlinear and fast: large contact interactions, severe deformation, material failure, or short-duration impacts. Implicit solvers are great for quasi-static or slowly evolving problems; Radioss is built for violent, transient events.

Often, yes. Radioss is known for input deck compatibility, which can reduce switching friction and preserve prior validation baselines. The right approach depends on your current deck type and modeling conventions, but it’s a major advantage when migrating workflows.

OpenRadioss is the open-source path related to the Radioss solver ecosystem. Teams typically evaluate it when they want openness and portability, while commercial Radioss is commonly chosen for production programs that prioritize enterprise-grade deployment, support, and integrated workflows.

We help you get value fast, onboarding, workflow setup, model review, and practical best practices for explicit crash/impact simulations. If you’re migrating from another solver, we also help you reduce risk through benchmarking and deck transition guidance, so your results stay consistent and defensible.

Ready to Take the Next Step with Radioss?

Talk to TrueInsight about Altair Radioss licensing, onboarding, and expert help for crash simulation software workflows so your team can move faster with more confidence.