With the advent of powerful computers, vehicle safety issues have recently been addressed using computational methods of vehicle crashworthiness, resulting in reductions in cost and time for new vehicle development. Vehicle design demands multidisciplinary optimization coupled with a computational crashworthiness analysis. However, simulation-based optimization generates deterministic optimum d...

Bridge rails are a type of longitudinal barrier that serves the important purpose of keeping vehicles on the bridge structure. Many different designs have evolved for bridge rails, including some based upon the cross sections used for rigid concrete safety shapes. These designs need to conform to the crashworthiness requirements of NCHRP Report 350 or MASH to be acceptable for use on U.S. highw...

In vehicle crashworthiness design optimization detailed system evaluation capable of producing reliable results are basically achieved through high-order numerical computational (HNC) models such as the dynamic finite element model, mesh-free model etc. However the application of these models especially during optimization studies is basically challenged by their inherent high demand on computa...

This paper investigates the relationship between a passenger car's year of registration and its crashworthiness and aggressivity in real-world crashes. Crashworthiness is defined as the ability of a car to protect its own occupants, and has been evaluated in single and two-car crashes. Aggressivity is defined as the ability to protect users travelling in other vehicles, and has been evaluated o...

This paper focusses on recent developments and on-going research related to parallel and distributed approaches for crashworthiness simulation, using the PAM-CRASH code from ESI as an example. The developments described here relate directly to the take-up in the automotive industry of the latest High Performance Computing (HPC) technology, since crash and safety analysis is well established in ...

To protect passengers, large aircraft are equipped with multiple mechanisms to absorb impact energy during a crash. However, light aircraft rely only on the cabin structure to withstand the compression and energy generated during a crash. This study performed a topology optimization analysis on the model structure by using Abaqus/optimization and used strain energy as the objective function and...

This paper presents a procedure to optimize a conceptual ship side structure from a crashworthiness point of view. As an example, this procedure is presented for a chemical or product tanker. A particle swarm optimization algorithm is used for the procedure. The classification society compliance of the conceptual design is checked through service loads that are applied to the ship’s hull girder...

The crashworthiness of helicopter fuel tank is vital to the survivability of the passengers and structures. In order to understand and improve the crashworthiness of the soft fuel tank of helicopter during the crash, this paper investigated the dynamic behavior of the nylon woven fabric composite fuel tank striking on the ground. A fluid-structure interaction finite element model of the fuel ta...