Lightweight design of automotive front rail based on topology optimisation and collision analysis

AbstractOn the premise of meeting the crash performance, in order to reduce the weight of the front rail of the automotive and improve the level of lightweight of the vehicle.Combining with the goal of ‘carbon reduction‘, a method of topology optimisation was used to optimise the lightweight performance of automotive front rail.Topology optimisation takes the front rail of the automobile as the research object, the installation area of the front rail as the design space of topology optimisation, the minimum strain energy as the optimisation goal, the relative density of the grid of each element as the design variable, and the mass fraction of the front rail as a constraint to design the topology optimisation. Then the optimal material distribution of the front rail of the vehicle is obtained. On this basis, the geometric dimensions of the section of the front rail are multi-objective optimised, the sample data are designed and the response surface model of optimisation objective are established through the design of the Latin square experiment. Based on the NSGA-II algorithm, the optimised mathematical model is solved by multi-objective optimisation. The results show that the weight of the optimised structure is reduced by 6.5% compared with the original structure, and the collision absorption energy is improved, and the peak acceleration is significantly reduced.Keywords: The front railtopology optimisationlightweightcrash resistance Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [51108068].