Simplification of Crash Barriers for Optimization of Vehicle Structures

New optimization strategies are developed at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) as part of the Next Generation Car META-project. The computational costs required for the various crash load cases are challenging for optimization of vehicle structures are. Besides the simulation of the vehicle structures, the simulation of deformable crash barriers are very time consuming, which makes the integration of these crash load cases challenging. In this paper a simplification strategy for deformable crash barriers are presented by replacing the honeycomb structures by macro elements. Due to the obtained reduction of computational costs, structural optimizations with deformable crash barriers can be performed