REVIEW ARTICLE


Crashworthiness Optimization of Thin-Walled Rail with Different Collision Boundary Conditions



Hequan Wu*, 1, 2, Libo Cao1, Hongfeng Mao2
1 State Key Laboratory of Advanced Design and Manufacturing for Vehicle Body, Hunan University, Changsha, 410082, P.R. China
2 Key Laboratory of Lightweight and Reliability Technology for Engineering Vehicle, College of Hunan province, Changsha University of Science and Technology, Changsha, 410114, P.R. China


© 2015 Gong et al

open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode). This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.



Abstract

As the world automotive crash safety regulations are different, it’s very important to design the energy absorbing structures that satisfy different collision boundary conditions. A large number of vehicle energy absorption beams dimensions were measured and then a common thin-walled rail was chosen. Considering the complexity of automobile collision boundary, finite element analysis and experimental design, interval uncertain algorithms, Kriging approximate model, NSGA - II genetic algorithm were combined to optimize the structure of the thin-walled rail with different impact velocity and different impact angle. Then the Pareto optimal solution was obtained. Thin walled beam after optimization has good energy absorption characteristics under different collision boundary conditions. Research results provide a method for the designing of a car that meets various crash regulations at the same time.

Keywords: Boundary conditions, crashworthiness, optimal design, thin-walled rail.