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Integrated design technique for materials and structures of vehicle body under crash safety considerations

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Abstract

With the rapid development of the vehicle industry, crashworthiness has become a crucial aspect in vehicle body design. In fact, crashworthiness is a multivariable optimization design problem for a vehicle body, regardless of structure or material. However, when crashworthiness involves a large number of design variables, including both material and structure variables, it is more difficult to deal with. In this paper, an integrated design technique for materials and structures of vehicle body under crash safety consideration is suggested. First, a finite element model of the vehicle body is established according to relevant vehicle safety standards. Then, the material parameters of the vehicle body are set as analytical factors for factor screening. Next, significant factors are obtained using a three-level saturated design integrated with multi-index comprehensive balance analysis and the MaxUr (3) method, with an improved evaluation method. These screened material parameters along with the corresponding continuous variables of the structure, are considered as the design variables of the integrated design of the vehicle body. Both the weight and the crashworthiness properties are set as the design objectives. Optimal Latin hypercube sampling and radius basis functions are utilized to construct highly accurate surrogate models. Furthermore, the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm II is implemented to seek the optimal solutions. Finally, two cases considering the roof module and the frontal module of a vehicle body are analyzed to verify the proposed method.

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Acknowledgements

The financial supports from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (11232004, 11572122), and from the New Century Excellent Talents Program in University (NCET-12-0168) are gratefully acknowledged. Moreover, Joint Center for Intelligent New Energy Vehicle is also gratefully acknowledged.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Advanced Design and Manufacturing for Vehicle Body, Hunan University, Changsha City, 410082, People’s Republic of China

    Yuan Chen, Guiping Liu, Zheyi Zhang & Shujuan Hou

  2. College of Mechanical and Vehicle Engineering, Hunan University, Changsha City, 410082, People’s Republic of China

    Yuan Chen, Guiping Liu, Zheyi Zhang & Shujuan Hou

Authors
  1. Yuan Chen
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  2. Guiping Liu
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  3. Zheyi Zhang
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  4. Shujuan Hou
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Guiping Liu.

Appendix

Appendix

Table 11 Appendix of critical values c 13,r;α for orthogonal designs using L 27(313) array
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Chen, Y., Liu, G., Zhang, Z. et al. Integrated design technique for materials and structures of vehicle body under crash safety considerations. Struct Multidisc Optim 56, 455–472 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00158-017-1674-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00158-017-1674-8

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