STRUCTURAL OPTIMIZATION OF PRODUCT FAMILIES EXPOSED TO CRASH LOADING

This paper discusses the problem of structural optimization in product family design and different methodologies are evaluated for weight optimization of components that are common for members in the family. First, the benefits of product family design are presented, followed by a discussion of the complexity of the design problem when the product family is exposed to crash loading and multiple load cases. It is concluded that in large problems the number of combinations of product and load case can get very large and due to the large number of simulations needed, it becomes practically impossible to solve the optimization problem with traditional methods. Therefore, a new methodology is presented that reduces the number of simulations by identifying the most critical combination of product and load case for every boundary condition and iteration. Different optimization methodologies are applied to a family of crash boxes and, finally, results and efficiencies are compared.