Vehicle Side-impact Crashworthiness Rapid Design

Vehicle’s side-impact crashworthiness development is of great difficulty and long cycle, in order to shorten the development cycle, reduce design cost and improve competitiveness, it is worth to study how to improve the crashworthiness design speed. Although finite element simulation is the main method of designing crashworthiness, in China, some application problems still remained due to its later start, including: lack of design methods in conceptual stage and lack of efficiency in engineering stage, these problems severely limits the design speed. In this thesis, rapid design methods were studied and demonstrated from three different levels such as simulation models, design methods and design process:First, model is the core of vehicle crash simulation method. In this thesis, some new models are developed and validated in order to fulfill the rapid design requirement such as 3D Hybrid model and reduced FE model.Furthermore, Design of Experiment (DOE) is a efficient method to study the relationship between the different factors (Xs) affecting a process and the output of that process (Y). To combine FE method with DOE will significantly improve the analytical speed that analyze the relationship betweent the vehicle body structure parameters and side-impact crashworthiness.In addition, new models & new design methods must integrate a new design process, and moreover, the design content of side-impact crashworthiness in different development stages must be of good continuity. In this thesis, a new process of side-impact crashworthiness design is designed which centers on the new models and new methods, fuses the relevant contents of side-impact crashworthiness design, considers the vehicle development environment.Overall, besides to solute the existing efficiency problems, the thesis formes a new methodology of designing side-impact crashworthiness; In addition, some applications of the new methods in this thesis show that the new methods are applicable and useful in engineering.Innovation of this paper: developing new modeling approaches to resolve the existing efficiency problems of designing side-impact crashworthiness and forming a new rapid design methodology with certain systematicness and integrity.