Automatic concept model generation for optimisation and robust design of passenger cars

A fully automated method of structural optimisation for the body in white structure is presented. The body in white is a technical term for the car body without windows and closures. The iterations in the optimisation loop comprise the following steps: fully parameterised design creation, automated meshing and model assembly, parallel computation and evaluation. For this purpose several free and commercially available software applications were combined, including: SFE concept, Hypermesh, Perl, Matlab, and Radioss. The optimisation was conducted using Genetic Algorithms (GA), which are ideally suited to solve problems with solution spaces that are too large to be exhaustively searched. The viability of the method is demonstrated for a vehicle component model of a front bumper system utilizing both material and geometry related properties as design variables.