Abstract:

The crashworthiness of B-pillar with tailored properties in vehicle side impact is researched based on dynamic explicit finite element method by taking the energy absorption and maximum intrusion of B-pillar as evaluation index. The effect of gradient strength distribution and gradient thickness distribution against collision performance is analyzed and their performance is compared to uniform strength B-pillar. In addition, radial basis function is applied to build the surrogate model of B-pillar and by which the multi-objective optimization design of B-pillar with tailored properties is carried out then. The results show that the performance of B-pillar with tailored properties are improved remarkably after optimization design, which proves that multi-objective optimization can further improve the comprehensive collision performance of vehicle structure.

Key words: crashworthiness, multi-objective optimization, radial basis function, tailored properties, hot forming