Recent Letter Received About A SAE Papers by RRM

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Recent Letter Received About A SAE Papers by RRM

Post by MSI »

Q: Received a very nice letter from a person in the reconstruction business in which he included a copy of Raymond R. McHenry's (RRM) 1975 SAE paper In the letter they also relayed that they started in this business in 1973, his discovery of the 1975 SAE paper, his use of Engineering Dynamics versions of SMAC and CRASH and that he had created a reconstruction program based on the 1975 paper by RRM.

A: The following is our response:

Thank you for the letter and paper. I shared it with Ray and he (and I) have the following comments, etc
1) Interesting you got the “proof” copy and appears to be from Calspan.
  • Unfortunately they don’t have any library services anymore
  • I was cleaning out things I had a LOT (and still do) of original Calspan reports (coil binder) and offered them to Calspan and they declined.
2) We appreciate you sending the paper however we have that and many others already scanned and posted up to the internet 3) You mentioned you programmed a reconstruction program from that paper in BASIC .
  • We’re guessing you coded the damage analysis portion? Be interesting to see what you’ve done.
  • You also mentioned you used EDC programs:
    • EDC got the original public domain versions of the CRASH and SMAC programs and converted them to BASIC and so with you using EDSMAC and EDCRASH you were using the code referenced in those papers.
    • EDC then went to C++ etc with their Windows/HVE versions of the programs.
  • We mainly used and updated and enhanced the original Fortran code instead of converting it to another language.
    • We do make additional enhancements and most of the graphics in C++ and Visual Basic
    • In modern computers all code can link at the machine level so its really a waste of time to convert languages of a computer program!
4) We don’t currently market CRASH as a separate product. 5) We are in the process of adding a CRASH damage analysis portion to our msmac3D Program with a number of improvements related to the damage area, offset and matching between the vehicles.
  • Mainly so users can see how damage analysis works and how to make the two programs match test results and how to convert the crush stiffness of SMAC to the virtual crush stiffness of CRASH and visa versa!
  • Is CRASH damage analysis a virtual relationship? And Why don't you use the A & B Coefficients in mSMAC?
  • Obviously having msmac3D to test/check the changes in CRASH is a definite plus
Ray has been retired for >15 years however he and I continue to work on several software projects.
I’d be interested in knowing what you programmed but not sure we can use it.

Thank you for sending the paper.

Brian McHenry