INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF VEHICLE DESIGN, cilt.83, sa.1, ss.54-68, 2020 (SCI-Expanded)
Especially during the last decade, electric vehicles have been used frequently in most of the countries. With the establishment of charging station infrastructures, fossil fuel vehicles will inevitably be replaced by electric vehicles in the next ten years. For this reason, electric vehicle components need to be developed very quickly. This paper concentrates on designing a new thin-walled energy absorber to be used in designing of electric vehicles. The material of the thin-walled energy absorber developed in this paper is cold-rolled advanced high-strength steel, which is Docol 1300. This research presents the first application of the slime mould algorithm to the optimum design of automobile components in the literature. Function evaluations are carried out using finite element analysis and estimated by using the kriging surrogate model. The results show that both the SMA and Docol 1300 advanced high-strength material provide exceptional features for enhancing crashworthiness in electric vehicle design, simultaneously.