Through finite element simulations, static and dynamic stiffness of the body-in-white (BIW) model are investigated. Design of computer experiments through Latin hypercube sampling (LHS) is used to sample the vehicle design space defined by the wall thicknesses of 20 parts. Radial basis function (RBF) is used to generate separate surrogate models for selected responses including bending, torsion, lateral and longitudinal stiffness as well as the fundamental natural frequencies. A non-linear constrained optimisation for mass minimisation is formulated and solved under two different cases. In the first case, the BIW model was optimised under just vibration whereas vibration and stiffness requirements are included in the second case. Results show that the noise-vibration-harshness (NVH) performance of the car improves when both vibration and stiffness requirements are included in the optimisation. This guideline not only reduced the mass but also improved the body structure stiffness (static and dynamic) as the basic criteria of body design.
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Kiani et al. (2015) studied this question.