Vehicle weight reduction, reduced costs and improved safety performance are the main driving forces behind today’s automotive industry. The continuous enhancements of safety norms across the globe making the vehicles heavier and heavier, on the other hand, every gram of weight saved reduces CO2 emissions and thus makes the vehicles eco-friendlier and more fuel efficient. It has been estimated that for every 10% of weight reduction from vehicle's total weight, fuel economy improves by 7%. To achieve both light weight and crash safety, the application of advanced high strength steels is essential. The reduction in sheet thickness by use of high strength steels is being increasingly adopted as an effective means for weight reduction without compromising in safety performance.Full vehicle crash simulations take longer solution times due to their nonlinearities involved in geometry, contact and material. During the preliminary design stage of the project, engineers face a challenge in material and geometry selection for better crash performance. In the concept stage of the product development, running full-vehicle detailed CAE models is not possible due to unavailability of&nbsp; data pertaining to geometry, material and vehicle architecture and so it is very important for the designer &nbsp;to come up with quick and efficient physics based low fidelity simulation methodologies, namely, beam modeling, lumped parameter modeling etc.. In the present work, a new methodology - Equivalent Energy Absorption (EEA) has been proposed to do a quick trade-off study between – Performance, Weight &nbsp;and Cost for various thicknesses and material combinations.&nbsp;A relationship is established between the gauge and grade of a component to derive an equivalent safety performance so that engineers can make quick decisions by conducting minimal number of simulations. To derive the relationship between gauge (thickness) and grade (material) of a component for a given geometry, a simple rectangular crush box was considered for study to assess the Energy Absorption (EA) with various material and thickness combinations. A Design of Experiments (DOE) study was done using simulations with many number of material grades and gauges to construct a 3D Response Surface between gauge, grade &amp; EA parameters to understand the replationship between each of these parameters.&nbsp;Application of this methodology has been discussed&nbsp;and the results obtained are validated using a full vehicle finite element anaysis in LS-DYNA. It is noted that there is more than 80% reduction in the evaluation time taken for arriving at the equivalent safety performance with resepct to baseline design. Also it is concluded that this methodology can be used as a quick material optimization tool without conducting a complex vehicle level DOE study for arriving at lightweight solution.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;

Equivalent Energy Absorption (EEA) - A Methodology for Improved Automotive Crash & Safety Design Energy Absorption ( Eea ) - a Methodology for Improved Automotive Crash & Safety Design

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/IMECE/IMECE2021/volume/85543

ASME 2021 International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition (IMECE2021)

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