Problem Definition

The eEgO research project meets the rising demand for crash simulations made necessary by stricter legal requirements, growing customer wishes and the use of new material combinations. The research and development of innovative software tools, as pursued through the eEgO project, aims to have a lasting positive impact on the virtual structural optimisation of vehicle bodies and thus to tap into a considerable economical and technical potential. The striving for a refinement of physical models does not only concern the number of elements, but also e.g. the improved depiction of material failures. The requirement of gaining robust conclusions from crash simulations also contributes to longer computing times due to the introduction of stochastic analyses. Even though this is offset by the increase in computing power per euro spent, it cannot make a real contribution to the reduction of computing time, which is indispensable if mathematical procedures of structural optimisation are to be used as efficient tools in vehicle development.

Simulation goal

Virtual crash simulations have been based on highly detailed finite element models requiring protracted computing times. These simulation models will become more and more refined in the future and thus even more compute-intensive. By using mathematical procedures for structural optimisation, it is possible to tap into a considerable potential for the design process - albeit necessitating between 500 and 1,000 of these crash calculations. For the industry, this entails computing times that are thus far neither economical nor practical. By employing physical and mathematical substitute models, the aim is to reduce the uneconomical and unpractical response times experienced during structural optimisation and to allow the use of these models in the vehicle development process. To this end, the eEgO project is developing new procedures, methods and software tools to (semi-)automatically derive suitable substitute models and to apply them in a new optimisation environment. The overall goal is to achieve a significant increase in the efficiency of structural optimisation. In addition to the reduction of computing times, substitute models offer another big advantage, namely providing system developers (suppliers) with an opportunity for development activities of their own on largely decoupled substitute models. There are also plans in place to examine these optimisation methods with regard to an expansion into other sectors (e.g. mechanical engineering).

Work Packages

• WP 0: Project coordination
• WP 1: Literature research
• WP 2: Provision and processing of industrial application examples
• WP 3: Definition of requirements, design variables, target values and restrictions
• WP 4: Method for the delineation of substructures
• WP 5: Procedure for creation of substructures
• WP 6: Method for the automatic update of substructures
• WP 7: Method for the deriving of physical substitute models
• WP 8: Procedure for hierarchical multilevel optimisation
• WP 9: Procedure for multimodel optimisation
• WP 10: Procedure for optimisation with discrete parameters
• WP 11: Mathematical substitute models / metamodels
• WP 12: Workflow