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

Design optimization is presented for the crash-worthiness improvement of an automotive body structure. The optimization objective was to improve automotive crashworthiness conditions according to the defined cri-terion (occupant chest deceleration) during a full frontal impact. The controllable factors used in this study con-sisted of six internal parts of the vehicle's frontal structure in a condition that their thickness was the "design param-eter". First using the Taguchi method, this study analyzed the optimum conditions in discontinuous design area and impact factors and their optimal levels of design objec-tives were obtained by analyzing the experimental results. Next to model a precise understanding of the explicit math-ematical input–output relationship, fuzzy logic is utilized which make use of full factorial design set of experimen-tal test cases resulted from Taguchi predicting formula-tions. 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 %