Customers have become increasingly educated in safety related performance, setting the bar higher for automotive interior trimming design for crashworthiness. At the moment, interior trimming performance is independently validated before coupling with the rest of the structure to assess the full vehicle performance. In recent years, numerical crashworthiness simulation has been enabling a substantial reduction in development time and costs, mainly by reducing expensive intermediate prototyping.
Although some difficulties still exist (e.g. accurate polymeric material models), good correlations between experimental and numerical data are being achieved. These results are building confidence towards the feasibility of a 100% virtual prototyping in the near future. To be able to achieve this objective, it’s necessary to start considering the variability that exists in actual testing conditions, since this can easily lead to a failure on apparently safe designs.
When testing, variability is already taken into account by performing repetitive tests, from which it can be observed that relevantly different results can be achieved. In spite of this situation no special effort has been given to try to evaluate and measure the dominant sources of variability and introducing it in the numerical models.
This paper presents an industrial example of an A-pillar trim design optimization for occupant head safety based in standard regulations, taking into account typical variability present in actual testing conditions. The analysis aims mainly at minimizing head injury by using a Reliability-based approach that takes into account a probabilistic constraint formulation.
