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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.

In this paper, a lightweight automotive prototype using alternative materials and gauge thickness was studied using numerical method. NVH performance was the main target to be verified in this study. The frequency response function (FRF) analysis of inner sound pressure was performed by associating FEM (finite element method) with BEM (boundary element method). Detailedly, in order to get the dynamic behavior of the auto-body structure, a frequency response function (FRF) of the body structure was calculated from 1Hz to 150Hz using FEM. Afterwards, the pressure response of the interior acoustic domain was solved by BEM. In order to reveal the structural panels that contributed most significantly to the interior sound pressure, the panel acoustic contribution analysis (PACA) was performed. Finally, the most contributing panel was located. The method used here was timesaving and helpful for the following structure optimization.