Multi-fidelity structural design for pedestrian safety with particular reference to the FlexPLI

Vehicle frontend design for pedestrian safety is a computationally and manually expensive challenge. For impacts of the Flexible Pedestrian Leg Impactor (FlexPLI), this thesis provides a general understanding of the impactor’s kinematics and an efficient approach to optimize its performance for given frontend shapes. Further, based on a given highly resolved finite element model an abstract simplified frontend model with high accuracy is derived. Its generation is simple to automate and it reduces computational cost by 90 %. Especially for structural optimization the efficiency of the model is beneficial. Therefore, three main approaches to parametrize the simplified model are introduced. They focus on three different aspects: The generation of specifications for measures to improve the FlexPLI’s performance, the transferability of the simplification’s observed trends and sensitivities to a full–scale model and the minimization of the computational and manual effort. Limiting factors of the low-fidelity model are investigated as well. In several examples the benefits of the approach are confirmed, especially for early phases of development.