The use of cellular materials in general in the automotive industry, and polymeric foams in particular, has been increasing significantly for the last few decades. These materials are used within a particular vehicle for many different purposes, among which are, for example, sound and thermal insulation, vibration damping, fire protection and, of course, crashworthiness. Thus, crashworthiness, ...

As a form of transport, rail has always maintained lower accident levels than its counterparts, the car and the airplane. The railway industry, however strives for still better safety measures to be implemented – a fact which intensifies with each accident that occurs. In the last years the continuous developments in technology, computer modeling capabilities and know-how have opened up various...

Meta-models are frequently used to offset high computational cost of crashworthiness optimization problems. Radial basis function based meta-models are gaining popularity among various meta-modeling techniques due to their ability to approximate non-linear responses with relatively low fitting cost. However, the performance of RBF networks is very sensitive to the choice of topology. In this pa...

The performance of radial basis function networks largely depends on the choice of topology i.e., location and number of centers, radius of influence. Thus finding the best network is a multi-level optimization problem. It is obvious that different criteria for optimization would result in different network topologies. A systematic study is carried out to compare the most widely used root mean ...

Many materials in nature exhibit excellent mechanical properties. In this study, we evaluated the bionic bumper structure models by using nonlinear finite element (FE) simulations for their crashworthiness under full-size impact loading. The structure contained the structural characteristics of cattail and bamboo. The results indicated that the bionic design enhances the specific energy absorpt...

Metamodel-based robust design methods are commonly used to mitigate the influence of parametric uncertainty associated in sheet gauges and material properties in crashworthiness-based vehicle lightweight design. Since the crash performances are highly nonlinear and high-dimensional responses, the prediction error of metamodels inevitably introduces the so-called metamodeling uncertainty in robu...

parametric design optimization of an automotive body crashworthiness improvement is presented. the thicknesses of parts are employed as design variables for optimization whose objective is to increase the maximum deceleration value of the vehicle center of gravity during an impact. using the taguchi method, this study analyzes the optimum conditions for design objectives and the impact factors ...