A Statistical Method to Substructure Crash Simulation Model

This work presents a statistical method to use a portion of a full finite element vehicle model on a crash analysis event. The substructure model is linked to the full model by recording the interface boundary history. The lateral moving deformable barrier (MDB) test by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) is used to demonstrate this substructure method: Substructure portion is identified by energy absorption distribution, and noise elements are filtered out by density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN), a nonsupervised machine learning method. Crashworthiness simulation is performed in LS-DYNA software, and results between substructure vehicle model, full vehicle model, and physical vehicle test results are compared. It shows the result from the substructure model is more effective without accuracy compromise.