Today, advanced manufacturing techniques, such as hydroforming for metallic tubes and near net shape manufacturing methods for composite parts, allow complex shapes and high-performance structures to be made quickly and cost effectively. Advanced automated shape optimization technology is required to take advantage of this new design flexibility. In addition, the introduction of new manufacturing processes and materials significantly increases the available design space, or the set of all possible designs for a problem. In order to explore this large design space more effectively while trying to reduce design cycle times, engineers often try to take advantage of automated design optimization and simulation software tools. These tools can greatly decrease the time required to identify a set of feasible, or even near-optimal, designs prior to building and testing the first prototype.
Advanced manufacturing allows complex shapes to be made quickly.
Optimizing multifunctional, energy-absorbing structures in a vehicle provides a challenge to safety engineers and to automated design techniques. Yet these same structures must collapse in a prescribed manner during a crash to maximize the amount of energy absorbed by the structure and limit the forces transmitted to passengers. Objectives and constraints related to crash energy management, stiffness, strength, and packaging are joined by additional requirements on manufacturability, noise and vibration, mass reduction, and robustness against process and material variation. These objectives compete strongly against one another, making this a very challenging multi-objective optimization problem. In this case, energy is absorbed primarily through plastic deformation of the material and friction due to surface contact.