Model reduction of head impact simulation on a vehicle bonnet

To reduce the severity of injuries due to head impact on a vehicle bonnet, car manufacturers spend large effort in designing and engineering the bonnet and introducing additional safety measures such as the pop-up bonnet concept. Performance assessment of such systems requires a large number of detailed impact simulations, which results in long computation time. The objective of this research is to reduce the computational burden by developing a reduced order model that meets the accuracy requirements for such a performance evaluation. A model reduction technique, based on “Proper Orthogonal Decomposition”, has been applied using only the results of a commercial Finite Element model for a bonnet of a production car. Special attention has been given to the analysis of information during the model reduction process to determine-at an early stage-the balance between required computation time, speed and accuracy of the resulting reduced model.