• International Journal of Automotive Technology
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.93-102
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• 2007

The frontal crash optimization of an engine room member using the response surface method was studied. The engine room member is composed of the front side member and the sub-frame. The thicknesses of the panels on the front side member and the sub-frame were selected as the design variables. The purpose of the optimization was to reduce the weight of the structure, under the constraint that the objective quantity of crash energy is absorbed. The response surface method was used to approximate the crash behavior in mathematical form for optimization procedure. To research the effect of the regression method, two different methodologies were used in constructing the response surface model, the least square method and the moving least square method. The optimum with the two methods was verified by the simulation result. The precision of the surrogate model affected the optimal design. The moving least square method showed better approximation than the least square method. In addition to the deterministic optimization, the reliability-based design optimization using the response surface method was executed to examine the effect of uncertainties in design variables. The requirement for reliability made the optimal structure be heavier than the result of the deterministic optimization. Compared with the deterministic optimum, the optimal design using the reliability-based design optimization showed higher crash energy absorption and little probability of failure in achieving the objective.

• Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.275-280
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• 2008

A technique for reliability-based design optimization(RBDO) is developed based on the Bayesian approach, which can deal with the epistemic uncertainty arising due to the limited number of data. Until recently, the conventional REDO was implemented mostly by assuming the uncertainty as aleatory which means the statistical properties are completely known. In practice, however, this is not the case due to the insufficient data for estimating the statistical information, which makes the existing RBDO methods less useful. In this study, a Bayesian reliability is introduced to take account of the epistemic uncertainty, which is defined as the lower confidence bound of the probability distribution of the original reliability. In this case, the Bayesian reliability requires double loop of the conventional reliability analyses, which can be computationally expensive. Kriging based dimension reduction method(KDRM), which is a new efficient tool for the reliability analysis, is employed to this end. The proposed method is illustrated using a couple of numerical examples.