An engineering approach to improve the accuracy of one-step simulation for vehicle forming-to-crashworthiness integrated evaluation

To improve the accuracy of the vehicle crashworthiness simulation, it is necessary as well as important to integrate the valid forming effects of key parts. It has been agreed by many that one-step simulation results should be used only as a qualitative trend of the part but not as an engineering result for further structural analysis, especially for a relatively complex part. The study shows that it is inaccurate to analyze the forming effects with one-step simulation based on the geometry of the final part through comparison with the incremental simulation and verification with the actual part, whether in thickness or in plastic strain. However, incremental simulation is very time consuming and infeasible in the early stage of vehicle design due to lack- ing of forming tools and process parameters. An engineering approach is proposed to meet the requirement of accuracy as well as the time efficiency, where one-step simulation is conducted based on the geometry of the transformed part instead of the fi- nN part. The geometry of the transformed part is generated by simple die design engineering and proves to offer much more accuracy than the one-step simulation based on the final part geometry.