Over the past several decades, a noticeable amount of research efforts has been directed to minimising injuries and death to people inside a structure that is subjected to an impact loading. Thin-walled (TW) tubular components have been widely employed in energy absorbing structures to alleviate the detrimental effects of an impact loading during a collision event and thus enhance the crashworthiness performance of a structure. Comprehensive knowledge of the material properties and the structural behaviour of various TW components under various loading conditions is essential for designing an effective energy absorbing system. In this paper, based on a broad survey of the literature, a comprehensive overview of the recent developments in the area of crashworthiness performance of TW tubes is given with a special focus on the topics that emerged in the last ten years such as crashworthiness optimisation design and energy absorbing responses of unconventional TW components including multi-cells tubes, functionally graded thickness tubes and functionally graded foam filled tubes. Due to the huge number of studies that analysed and assessed the energy absorption behaviour of various TW components, this paper presents only a review of the crashworthiness behaviour of the components that can be used in vehicles structures including hollow and foam-filled TW tubes under lateral, axial, oblique and bending loading.

https://myresearchspace.uws.ac.uk/ws/files/1765038/Paper_2.pdf

On the crashworthiness performance of thin-walled energy absorbers: Recent advances and future developments

Optimization for structural crashworthiness and energy absorption has become an important topic of research attributable to its proven benefits to public safety and social economy. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the important studies on design optimization for structural crashworthiness and energy absorption. First, the design criteria used in crashworthiness and energy absorption are reviewed and the surrogate modeling to evaluate these criteria is discussed. Second, multiobjective optimization, optimization under uncertainties and topology optimization are reviewed from concepts, algorithms to applications in relation to crashworthiness. Third, the crashworthy structures are summarized, from generically novel structural configurations to industrial applications. Finally, some conclusions and recommendations are provided to enable academia and industry to become more aware of the available capabilities and recent developments in design optimization for structural crashworthiness and energy absorption.

On design optimization for structural crashworthiness and its state of the art

Crashing analysis and multiobjective optimization for thin-walled structures with functionally graded thickness

A review on functionally graded structures and materials for energy absorption

Weight reduction of vehicle is very important because vehicle weight directly affects energy consumption. Studies researching lightweight vehicle manufacturing process that use polymers are reviewed in this paper. Approaches reducing the weights of vehicles using polymers most frequently involve replacing ferrous and non-ferrous metals with polymers and increasing the specific strengths and rigidities of polymers. Researches into polymers for use in lightweight vehicle are classified into high performance polymers, polymers for weight reduction, reinforced polymer composites, polymer sandwich panels, and polymer/metal hybrid systems. A diverse range of polymer materials can be used to make vehicle components and the manufacturing methods required to produce and work those materials vary greatly. Shaping processes must be chosen according to the materials being used and the product design. Replacement of metal products with polymer materials in current vehicles is limited. Large amounts of lightweight materials, such as polymers, will be greatly used to construct newly developed vehicles, including electric and electric/hybrid vehicles.

Research trends in polymer materials for use in lightweight vehicles

Metamodel-based lightweight design of B-pillar with TWB structure via support vector regression

Nowadays, both conventional automobiles and new energy cars require urgently the lightweight design to realise energy economy and environmental protection in a long run. The weight reduction of body structure plays a rather important role in decreasing the weight of full vehicle. In the real engineering problems, the variation in sheet gauge, geometrical size and material parameters, caused by environmental factors and other uncertainties, may affect the structural performances of body parts. Therefore, the lightweight design without considering this kind of tolerance may result in the loss of feasibility and reliability in engineering application. In this work, based on robust optimisation method, the study on the front side rail lightweight design is performed. The response surface method (RSM), coupled with design of experiment (DOE) technique, is employed to create the approximate functions of structural performances. The robust optimisation and deterministic optimisation formulations are constructed, respectively, for comparison. The solutions are obtained by using the sequential quadratic programming (SQP) algorithm. The lightweight design, considering the impact of the tolerance of sheet gauge, mechanical parameters of material and structural performances, is still guaranteed to be reliable when structural random varieties are present. The weight reduction achieved by using robust optimisation reached 29.96%.

Lightweight Design of Automotive Front Side Rail Based on Robust Optimisation

Metamodeling development for reliability-based design optimization of automotive body structure

The invention relates to a finite element modeling method for the welding line of a soldering board based on vehicle crash simulation, belonging to the vehicle computer-aided design technique field, comprising the following steps: first, baseplate modeling, which comprises baseplate hard spot arrangement, baseplate reseau partition, and baseplate reseau translation; second, building a double-beam welding line model, which comprises space nodes arrangement, a double-beam manufacturing, and connection of the beam and baseplate; third, the attribute assignment of the double-beam unit, which comprises the attribute assignment of beam unit material and the attribute assignment of the beam unit section; fourth, moving the built welding line model of the soldering board and the baseplate reseau model into an impact finite element computational model. The invention considers the material attributes of the welding line, as well as considers the shape of the welding line, can accurately simulate the deformational behavior of the welding line in crash simulation, enhances the simulation accuracy of vehicle crash, is rapid and effective, and is easy to master technicist.

Assembly soldering plate welded seam finite element modeling method based on vehicle collision simulation

The invention relates to car body design field in particular to car body structure optimization system which is based on the stable design The invention is characterized in that CUI module is the graph user interface that the users use; the middle result and last result of the module in the interactive operation process is received; the variable definition module is responsible for the determination of designing variable and noise factors and transfer the results to CUI module; response face modeling module is responsible for buliding designing variable, noise factors and mathematical model of car body structure property index and then transfering to CUI module and stable optimization module; the stable optimization module builds stable desiging rule function and property probabiligy limiting relationship and completes the buliding of stable structure optimization mathematical model, then get the best stable designing result of the stable structure optimization mathematical model by optimization and transfer the best result to CUI module The invention has the advantages that the invention relates to the influence that the designing variable and noise factors differences works on the structure property index; the propabiligy caculation of the property limiting function is accurate

Yu Zhang

Papers

Metamodel-based lightweight design of B-pillar with TWB structure via support vector regression

Lightweight Design of Automotive Front Side Rail Based on Robust Optimisation

Metamodeling development for reliability-based design optimization of automotive body structure

Assembly soldering plate welded seam finite element modeling method based on vehicle collision simulation

Car body structure optimum system based on solidity design