Abstract

Going green does not mean spending more greenbacks. Ecological has reached and is surpassing economical in priority of design engineering. While tradeoffs have always been an understood aspect of engineering design, the demands on the individual design engineer have transformed many ?either-or? considerations into multiple ?and? requirements. For example, it is no longer acceptable for a design to be heavy but safe or lighter weight but more expensive. Today?s design engineer is being driven to make every individual part design: better and faster and cheaper and lighter and safer and sooner. Physical structures must be designed to maximize product performance while minimizing the amount of material and resources required to purchase, warehouse, manufacture, distribute service and support the products of today and tomorrow. Also, legacy product sustaining engineering 'same form-fit-function' parts provide opportunity to increase the profitability of aftermarket service and maintenance. This paper details the design system that efficiently performs optimization based on responses computed from multiple Ansys® LS-Dyna® analyses while accounting for linear loading conditions such as those for NVH and Static responses. The design system, OmniQuest- GENESIS® ESLDYNA (ESLDYNA), implements the Equivalent Static Load (ESL) method requiring iterative processing of non-linear structural analysis (Ansys LS-Dyna) and linear structural analysis and optimization (OmniQuest- GENESIS®). Unlike general purpose optimization software packages, ESLDYNA does not require excessive analysis calls even for problems with large numbers of design parameters. Therefore, large-scale optimization techniques (e.g., freeform, topography, topology, topometry, shaping, sizing) are easily accomplished. The GENESIS® setup to perform multiple concurrent optimization analyses using the same base design model is also described for implementing parallel optimizations, each of which implements parallel execution of GENESIS® analysis and optimization within each optimization type. Several examples using different optimization techniques are presented. One example includes optimizing the design for frontal crash, normal modes, and static loading conditions simultaneously.