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Lightweight vehicle design has become an imperative in today's automotive industry. And it is a difficult task, which usually involves non-obvious decisions beyond the designer's intuition. In practice, optimization through finite element simulation is prohibitively inappropriate due to massive computational cost. As a consequence, approximation method is extensively used. In this paper, lightweight design of front side rail through high strength steel is performed. And the advantages of weighted average surrogate (WAS) for approximating the crashworthiness responses in frontal crash are also discussed. It shows the strategy of using WAS is effective, with great potential applications for vehicle crashworthiness approximation and lightweight design.

It has been the core problem in the automotive industry to realize vehicle lightweight, fuel economy and environmental protection. Weight reduction of body structure is playing a rather important role in lightening of a full vehicle. This paper presents the study, from the point of view of safety, of the structural lightweight of the front side rail and radiator support of a new multi-purpose vehicle (MPV). Frontal crash simulation is performed and comparison is shown with original crashworthiness performance of full vehicle, in deformed shape of parts, force response, original absorbed energy of full vehicle and deceleration of a key point in A-pillar. The study verifies the feasibility of this lightweight scheme, which is an exploration in the study on structural lightweight of auto-body and may offer a referential experience for the future work. Achieved weight reductions of the front side rail and radiator support are 9.11% and 22.88%, respectively.