Abstract
The side-door beam provides resistance to dynamic intrusion during side crash event and has to meet the FMVSS214 requirements. Its design has to meet performance criteria such as (a) average and peak load resistance, (b) maximum tensile plastic strains at the flange edge, (c) section opening at the ram loading region, and (d) no buckling along length except near the load application region. The current design process is iterative, and often requires engineering intuition and significant effort from the engineers to balance mass, performance targets, and the design criteria. The purpose of this research is to mathematically define the aforementioned complex performance criteria and apply them to an optimization framework. This will allow design space exploration to identify mass-efficient designs that meet FMVSS214 requirements. Parametric design optimization using meta-modeling technique is evaluated. This technique has the advantage that the performance LS-DYNA® model can be utilized, and therefore, the design can be performed for the actual targets. Displacement based mathematical formulation of the beam end-buckling criteria is also presented. The methodology presented here is successfully able to identify feasible designs with 14% improvement in average force while reducing mass by as much as 19%.