Multivariable crashworthiness optimization of vehicle body by unreplicated saturated factorial design

Crashworthiness, influenced unequally by disparate factors such as the structural dimensions and the material parameters, represents a natural benchmark criterion to judge the passive safety quality of the automobile design. The unreplicated saturated factorial design has enjoyed a remarkable success in the factor screening of different industrial regions due to its huge benefits in the efficiency and accuracy. In order to single out the active factors which pose a profound impact on the crashworthiness, this paper introduces an unreplicated saturated factorial design to tackle the obstacle from the factor screening during the multivariable crashworthiness optimization design of the whole vehicle body. Three unreplicated saturated factorial design methods, including the normal or half-normal probability plot method, Dong93 method, and PSZ method, are employed to capture the active factors while D-optimal design is presented to obtain the design sampling points and to construct the response surface model for the crashworthiness optimization problem. Finally, multi-island genetic algorithm (MIGA) and sequential quadratic programming (SQP)-NLPQL are utilized to obtain the Pareto set of the optimal solution for the multivariable crashworthiness optimization design of the vehicle body under the full-scale frontal impact loading.