Automatic Evaluation of Structural Integrity in Crashworthiness Simulations Using Image Analysis

This paper presents an analysis of the possibility to evaluate full vehicle crashworthiness simulations automatically. Nowadays the evaluation of full vehicle crashworthiness simulations is done by only a few hard numerical criteria and a lot of soft criteria which get evaluated visually based on engineering experience. This lead to the crashworthiness simulation being regarded as not suitable for automatic evaluation and thus optimization. Therefore the evaluation criteria need to be formalized. Using the example of structural integrity of a left floor in the pole crash load case this paper shows the possibility to filter the objective part in the visual evaluation from the subjective part, deduce evaluation pattern from the objective part and implement those patterns in an automatic evaluation tool. The prototype of the automatic evaluation process is able to generate a numerical parameter which can be used as a restriction in a weight optimization process.