Optimal design of automotive body B-pillar using simplified finite element model of body-in-prime combined with an optimization procedure

Abstract

Optimization of an automotive body structure faces the difficulty of having too many design variables and a too large design search space. A simplified model of body-in-prime (BIP) can solve this difficulty by reducing the number of design variables. In this study, to achieve lighter weight and higher stiffness, the simplified model of BIP was developed and combined with an optimization procedure; consequently, optimal designs of automotive body B-pillar were produced. B-pillar was divided into four quarters and each quarter was modelled by one simplified beam. In the optimization procedure, depth, width, and thickness of the simplified beams were considered as the design variables. Weight, bending and torsional stiffness were also considered as objective functions. The optimization procedure is composed of six stages: designing the experiments, calculating grey relational grade, calculating signal-to noise ratio, finding an optimum design using Taguchi grey relational analysis, performing sensitivity analysis using analysis of variance (ANOVA) and performing non-dominated sorting and multi-criteria decision making. The results show that the width of lower B-pillar has the highest effect (about 55%) and the obtained optimum design point could reduce the weight of B-pillar by about 40% without reducing the BIP stiffness by more than 1.47%.

Keywords

body-in-prime (BIP) model / finite element model / bending stiffness / torsional stiffness / B-pillar / Taguchi method / multi criterion decision-making (MCDM) method

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