Optimization for vibration reduction in final phase of automotive body structural design

In automotive body structural design, Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) has been widely used in order to evaluate noise, vibration, harshness (NVH). A CAE engineer has usually used a large-scale finite element model exceeding 1 million degrees of freedom to improve NVH performance criteria in the final design phase. It is, however, difficult for a CAE engineer to propose the modification candidate for the NVH reduction to an automotive designer in the phase, while good accuracy of the analysis is obtained by using the large-scale model. Only the small modifications can be performed for the NVH performance since configurations of main frame structures are usually determined with respect to crashworthiness in the phase. Therefore, a CAE engineer cannot provide the designer with effective information on time. In this paper, a new optimal design method using a reduction scheme based on the physical coordinates under many design constraints regarding the crashworthiness is proposed in order to overcome above problems. Our proposed method finds out an optimal layout and stiffness value efficiently from the calculation results of the large-scale model. That is, we determine the appropriate location and additional scalar spring constants by minimizing the acceleration of the observation grid. The effectiveness and availability of this method are confirmed using an example.