Robustness study of top-hat sections of high strength steel subjected to axial crushing

In problems concerning vehicle crashworthiness the crash safety should be appropriate despite fluctuations in structural parameters and product conditions. Hence, the structure should be sufficiently insensitive to physical scatter. A structure that is sufficiently insensitive to physical scatter is said to behave robustly. In order to test if the structure behaves robustly several replicates have to be tested in order to indentify the size of the scatter in the behaviour. For the automotive industry it is very costly to perform replicates of full-scale crash tests and hence it is desirable to predict the robustness by use of finite element simulations. In the present study the robustness of a top-hat section of DP800 subjected to axial crushing was first investigated experimentally. Then the influence of taking into account process history, material variation and geometric imperfections in simulations of the top-hat section was investigated and compared to experimental results.