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Crashworthiness design of multi-component tailor-welded blank (TWB) structures

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Abstract

Crashworthiness of tailor-welded blank (TWB) structures signifies an increasing concern in lightweight design of vehicle. Although multiobjective optimization (MOO) has to a considerable extent been successfully applied to enhance crashworthiness of vehicular structures, majority of existing designs were restricted to single or uniform thin-walled components. Limited attention has been paid to such non-uniform components as TWB structures. In this paper, MOO of a multi-component TWB structure that involves both the B-pillar and inner door system subjected to a side impact, is proposed by considering the structural weight, intrusive displacements and velocity of the B-pillar component as objectives, and the thickness in different positions and the height of welding line of B-pillar as the design variables. The MOO problem is formulated by using a range of different metamodeling techniques, including response surface methodology (RSM), artificial neural network (ANN), radial basis functions (RBF), and Kriging (KRG), to approximate the sophisticated nonlinear responses. By comparison, it is found that the constructed metamodels based upon the radial basis function (RBF, especially multi-quadric model, namely RBF-MQ) fit to the design of experiment (DoE) checking points well and are employed to carry out the design optimization. The performance of the TWB B-pillar and indoor panel system can be improved by optimizing the thickness of the different parts and height of the welding line. This study demonstrated that the multi-component TWB structure can be optimized to further enhance the crashworthiness and reduce the weight, offering a new class of structural/material configuration for lightweight design.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported from National 973 Project of China (2010CB328005), The National Natural Science Foundation of China (61232014, 11202072), The Doctoral Fund of Ministry of Education of China (20120161120005), The Open Fund of Key Laboratory of Manufacture and Test Techniques for Automobile Parts (Chongqing University of Technology), Ministry of Education (KLMT201201), and The Open Fund of Traction Power State Key Laboratory of Southwest Jiaotong University (TPL1206). The authors would like to thank the Graduate Student Innovation Project of Hunan province, China (521298760).

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  1. State Key Laboratory of Advanced Design and Manufacturing for Vehicle Body, Hunan University, Changsha, 410082, China

    Fengxiang Xu, Guangyong Sun & Guangyao Li

  2. Key Laboratory of Manufacture and Test Techniques for Automobile Parts (Chongqing University of Technology), Ministry of Education, Chongqing, 400054, China

    Fengxiang Xu

  3. School of Aerospace, Mechanical and Mechatronic Engineering, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, 2006, Australia

    Qing Li

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  1. Fengxiang Xu
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Correspondence to Guangyao Li.

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Xu, F., Sun, G., Li, G. et al. Crashworthiness design of multi-component tailor-welded blank (TWB) structures. Struct Multidisc Optim 48, 653–667 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00158-013-0916-7

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