Occupant’s lower extremities’ impact-based model calibration for vehicle under-belly blast

Computer-aided engineering (CAE) technology is an important tool in the research of vehicle under-belly blast. A high-quality CAE model is required to guarantee accurate prediction. This requires an efficient model calibration process with physical testing, but the traditional model calibration method based on trial and error and operators’ experience is usually very inefficient and arbitrary. In this paper, an automatic model calibration process based on the Error Assessment of Response Time Histories (EARTH) metric is applied. The EARTH metric evaluates the discrepancies between test and CAE by quantifying the phase error, magnitude error, and slope error between their time histories. Then, an automatic calibration process can be achieved by solving a multi-objective optimization problem for which the optimization object is minimizing discrepancies between testing and CAE and results in automatic calibration of key parameters of the blast simulation CAE model. A case of occupant’s lower extremities’ responses under vehicle under-belly blast load is studied as an example to demonstrate the feasibility of the applied method.