The ESR will develop models of wire bundles based on non-smooth contact dynamics with applications to wiring harnesses which are compound, multi-wired rod-like structures. The simulation tool will combine an open-source advanced contact solver developed by INRIA in a project on hair simulation with an open-source rod formulation to be developed by ESR3. The ESR will conduct a comparison of these two approaches in terms of robustness and efficiency. The final aim of ESR3 is to develop a simulation code for mesoscopic structure models to perform virtual experiments able to reproduce and predict the outcome of the experiments performed by ESR11 in hardware.

Virtual experiments with mesoscopic models developed by ESR3 yield a powerful tool to analyse and interpret the outcome of the experiments performed by ESR11, provide an independent approach, complementary to the one developed by ESR6, to study harness-like structures, and thus enables a mutual validation of these methods.