An Assessment of an FEA Body Model for Design Capability

Finite Element Analysis (FEA) models are routinely being adopted for up-front automotive body structure design. FEA models serve two important functions: first, to assess a design versus an absolute target; second, to assess the performance of various design alternatives. Means of assessing model capability are required to feed appropriate information into the design process. Being able to document model capability improves the credibility of the FEA model information. Previous work addressed assessing the absolute performance of model technology using a metric based on a statistical hypotheses test that determines membership in a reference set. This article extends the use of quality technology to determining the capability of the FEA model to span the design space using Designed Experiments. The advantage of a design of experiments (DOE) structure is that both the design effects and their statistical significance are uncovered.