Citation

Tho CH, Wang BP. J. Am. Helicopter Soc. 2009; 54(4): 042003-42012.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2009, American Helicopter Society)

DOI

10.4050/JAHS.54.042003

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Crashworthiness design optimization problems are continuously challenged by inherent complexity of long simulation time, numerical instability, and unavailability of sensitivity analysis. In recent years, surrogate-model-based design optimization using design of experiments and response surface methodology has proven to be a promising way to achieve the improved design for crashworthiness problems. However, the method is still hampered by a large number of function evaluations for a large number of design variables or low accuracy for small sample size. This paper presents an effective simulation-based optimization algorithm for optimal design of large-scale, computationally expensive crashworthiness problems. The proposed optimization algorithm is called the sequential regularized multiquadric regression with output space mapping (SRMQ/OSM). The proposed method is demonstrated on two simple numerical problems and is subsequently extended to a generic helicopter skid landing gear optimization problem to improve the energy absorption efficiency with prescribed design constraints. The results show that the proposed approach converged quickly to a feasible design with no constraint violation. The improved skid gear design obtained by the proposed SRMQ/OSM method exhibits better impact performance in terms of energy absorption, peak acceleration, onset rate, and pulse duration. ©2009 American Helicopter Society.