These slides were presented at the NAFEMS World Congress 2025, held in Salzburg, Austria from May 19–22, 2025.

Abstract

Ensuring the compliance to regulatory requirements is a mandatory process for many products to be allowed on the market. The assessment of product performance is largely based on physical testing of a few samples and, possibly, monitoring of the production process. In order to reduce cost and time-to-market associated to the certification process, manufacturing companies have increased their efforts to establish numerical simulations as a legitimate alternative to physical testing, thus introducing the notion of 'œCertification by Analysis' (CbA). In some sectors, certification bodies responded to the industrial drive towards virtual testing by developing guidelines and standardised reporting documents to streamline the credibility assessment of the results of numerical simulations without compromising the safety of the certification decision. However, there are still significant differences in the acceptance of CbA, and the maturity of its practical implementation among different industrial sectors. In this contribution, a review of existing examples of CbA is presented, together with the preliminary study of a potential new case. The role of standards in the specification of product requirements and assessment methods (for physical as well as virtual testing) will be considered, drawing on the work done in the research project STEERING funded by the Swedish Innovation Agency (VINNOVA). The review will focus on the identification of similarities and differences in requirements, methodologies, and challenges faced by manufacturers and certification bodies. The analysis of established cases provides the starting point to investigate the role of CbA in applications where product certification currently relies fully on physical testing. The feasibility of CbA will be studied in the assessment of crashworthiness requirements for a component made of fibre-reinforced polymer composite material. This preliminary study is developed within the COST Action HISTRATE, a European network of academic researchers and industrial stakeholders that aims at establishing the scientific foundation of a reliable framework for CbA of composite structures subjected to high-strain loads.