A new approach for optimizing automotive crashworthiness: concurrent usage of ANFIS and Taguchi method

Design optimization is presented for the crashworthiness improvement of an automotive body structure. The optimization objective was to improve automotive crashworthiness conditions according to the defined criterion (occupant chest deceleration) during a full frontal impact. The controllable factors used in this study consisted of six internal parts of the vehicle's frontal structure in a condition that their thickness was the "design parameter". First using the Taguchi method, this study analyzed the optimum conditions in discontinuous design area and impact factors and their optimal levels of design objectives were obtained by analyzing the experimental results. Next to model a precise understanding of the explicit mathematical input-output relationship, fuzzy logic is utilized which make use of full factorial design set of experimental test cases resulted from Taguchi predicting formulations. Interestingly, the optimum conditions for automotive crashworthiness occurred with 2.72 % improvement in the defined crashworthiness criterion in comparison with the baseline design while selected structural parts experienced mass reduction by 8.23 %.