Abstract
This paper presents an optimal design method for structure-borne durability of a vehicle body structure. Structure-borne durability design requires a new design that can increase fatigue lives of critical areas in a structure and must prohibit transition phenomenon of critical areas that results from modification of the structure at the same time. Therefore, the optimization problem fur structure-borne durability design are consists of an objective function and design constraints of 2 types; type 1-constraint that increases fatigue lives of the critical areas to the required design limits and type 2-constraint that prohibits transition phenomenon of critical areas. The durability design problem is generally dynamic because a designer must consider the dynamic behavior such as fatigue analyses according to the structure modification during the optimal design process. This design scheme, however, requires such high computational cost that the design method cannot be applicable. For the purpose of efficiency of the durability design, we presents a method which carry out the equivalent static design problem instead of the dynamic one. In the proposed method, dynamic design constraints for fatigue life, are replaced to the equivalent static design constraints for stress/strain coefficients. The equivalent static design constraints are computed from static or eigen-value analyses. We carry out an optimal design for structure-borne durability of the newly developed bus and verify the effectiveness of the proposed method by examination of the result.
