An Alternative Design Approach for Vehicle Crash Safety Using Crash Pulse Optimization

This paper presents an approach, based on numerical optimization techniques, to identify an ideal (5 star) crash pulse and generate a band of acceptable crash pulses surrounding that ideal pulse. This band can be used by engineers to quickly determine whether a design will satisfy government and corporate safety requirements, and whether the design will satisfy the requirements for a 5 star crash rating. A piecewise linear representation of the crash pulse with two plateaus is employed for its conceptual simplicity and because such a pulse has been shown to be sufficient for reproducing occupant injury behavior when used as input into MADYMO models. The piecewise linear crash pulse is parameterized with 7 design variables (5 for time domain and 2 for acceleration domain) in the optimization process. A series of sample runs are conducted to validate that pulses falling within the acceptable crash pulse band do in fact satisfy 5 star requirements.