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Structures with multiple materials have now become one of the perceived necessities for automotive industry to address vehicle design requirements such as light-weight, safety, and cost. The objective of this study is to develop a design methodology for multi-material structures accountable for vehicle crash durability. The heuristic topology synthesis approach of Hybrid Cellular Automaton (HCA) framework is implemented to generate multi-material structures with the constraint on the volume fraction of the final design. The HCA framework is integrated with ordered-SIMP (solid isotropic material with penalization) interpolation, artificial material library, as well as statistical analysis of material distribution data to ensure a smooth transition between multiple practical materials during the topology synthesis.

Sandwich structures with honeycomb core are widely used in the lightweight design and impact energy absorption applications in automotive, sporting, and aerospace industries. Recently, the auxetic honeycombs with negative Poisson's ratio attract substantial attention for different engineering products. In this study, we implement Additive Manufacturing technology, experimental testing, and Finite Element Analysis (FEA) to design and investigate the mechanical behavior of a novel unit cell for sandwich structure core. The new core model contains the conventional and auxetic honeycomb cells beside each other to create a Hybrid Honeycomb (HHC) for the sandwich structure. The different designs of unit cells with the same volume fraction of 15% are 3D-printed using Fused Deposition Modeling technique, and the comparative study on the mechanical behavior of conventional honeycomb, auxetic honeycomb, and HHC structures is conducted.

This paper introduces a design methodology to tailor the acceleration and displacement responses of a vehicle structure subjected to a dynamic crushing load. The proposed approach is an extension of the hybrid cellular automaton (HCA) method, through which the internal energy density is uniformly distributed within the structure. The proposed approach, referred here to as an extended HCA (xHCA) method, receives the suitable combinations of volume fraction and a finite element meta-parameter for which the algorithm synthesizes the load paths that allow the desired crash response. Lower meta-parameter values lead designs obtained by traditional optimizers, while larger values lead to designs obtained by the HCA method. Simultaneous implementation of multiple values of meta-parameters is presented here as a further development of xHCA method.