Crashworthiness study of a full vehicle-lumped model using parameters optimisation

Abstract

In this study, a new full vehicle-lumped model is presented for frontal crash investigation considering energy absorption. The proposed model which has 12 degrees of freedom (DOF) involves all important structural parts. What makes this study important is a new algorithm related to system identification including problem-solving and genetic algorithm (GA) to find the unknown lumped parameters. In addition, GA was used for calculating the optimised parameters of 12-DOF model for two vehicle types (a sedan and a pick-up) in two different frontal crashes. The vehicle responses of proposed lumped model have been compared to the experimental responses for vehicles, a sedan and a pickup diachronically. The results show that the proposed full vehicle-lumped model with calculated parameters can accurately simulate the deceleration and velocity reduction for vehicle and occupant. Furthermore, by adding a mass as a barrier, the model is improved to simulate the cases of excitation. In addition, in this study the shape of the excitation force on the lumped parameter models (LPMs) is investigated; and a hybrid force of sinusoidal and cosine excitations to replace instead of crash pulse is presented. Overall, the purpose of this work is to create a model which can be used alone or to determine the lumped parameters of combined lumped mass and finite-element (FE) models.

Keywords:

• vehicle
• frontal crash
• optimisation
• genetic algorithm
• lumped model

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.