Robust design Accounting for uncertainties in engineering

Sammanfattning: This thesis concerns optimization of structures considering various uncertainties. The overall objective is to find methods to create solutions that are optimal both in the sense of handling the typical load case and minimising the variability of the response, i.e. robust optimal designs.Traditionally optimized structures may show a tendency of being sensitive to small perturbations in the design or loading conditions, which of course are inevitable. To create robust designs, it is necessary to account for all conceivable variations (or at least the influencing ones) in the design process.The thesis is divided in two parts. The first part serves as a theoretical background to the second part, the two appended articles. This first part includes the concept of robust design, basic statistics, optimization theory and meta modelling.The first appended paper is an application of existing methods on a large industrial example problem. A sensitivity analysis is performed on a Scania truck cab subjected to impact loading in order to identify the most influencing variables on the crash responses.The second paper presents a new method that may be used in robust optimizations, that is, optimizations that account for variations and uncertainties. The method is demonstrated on both an analytical example and a Finite Element example of an aluminium extrusion subjected to axial crushing.