Beam Bounding Box – a novel approach for beam concept modeling and optimization handling

Simplified models of the vehicle structure are often used during the concept phase of vehicle development to improve the Noise, Vibration and Harshness (NVH) performance. Together with the structural joints and panels, beams are one of the constituent parts of these models. There are different approaches for their modeling and optimization handling, which however are either not able to maintain the similarity with the detailed Finite Element (FE) model (reference and/or optimized) or suffering some flexibility and performance issues. The objective of the current work is to develop and validate a new method which is an improved alternative of the existing approaches. It keeps the reference cross-sectional shapes of all 1D beams, but when each of them is rescaled during optimization, the beam is represented by means of generic cross-sectional properties. Thus a lighter and simpler representation of the concept beams is created and at the same time the connection with the detailed FE model is not broken. The feasibility of the approach is successfully verified for a set of representative beam cross-sections and then for an industrial case study. Its benefit in terms of computational time is also demonstrated. The proposed method can be easily implemented and then applied to make concept modeling for the vehicle structure faster and more flexible.