Multi-Disciplinary Design Optimization for Occupant Safety: Leveraging Your LS-DYNA® Simulations

Automotive companies have become increasingly educated in safety related performance, setting the bar higher for automotive crashworthiness. Process Automation and Design Optimization (PIDO) tools help LS-DYNA users to reach these safer designs in a shorter period. In this paper, various application cases are used to demonstrate how PIDO tools can leverage your existing simulation codes. In the first application case, a multi-disciplinary crash optimization case, executed at an automotive company, is discussed in detail. How can you optimize systems while taking into account multiple different government safety regulations? How can you reduce the throughput time of your CPU intensive LS-DYNA simulations? How can you manage and visualize the obtained data? During the second application case, an industrial example of an A-pillar trim design optimization for occupant head safety is presented. During the optimization the variability present in actual testing conditions is also taken into account. The analysis aims mainly at minimizing head injury by using a Reliability-based approach that takes into account a probabilistic constraint formulation