Enhanced Error Assessment of Response Time Histories (EEARTH) Metric and Calibration Process 2011-01-0245

Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) has become a vital tool for product development in automotive industry. Increasing computer models are developed to simulate vehicle crashworthiness, dynamic, and fuel efficiency. Before applying these models for product development, model validation needs to be conducted to assess the validity of the models. However, one of the key difficulties for model validation of dynamic systems is that most of the responses are functional responses, such as time history curves. This calls for the development of an objective metric which can evaluate the differences of both the time history and the key features, such as phase shift, magnitude, and slope between test and CAE curves. One of the promising metrics is Error Assessment of Response Time Histories (EARTH), which was recently developed. Three independent error measures that associated with physically meaningful characteristics (phase, magnitude, and slope) were proposed. However, combining the three error measures into one rating score is unavailable. In this paper, an enhanced EARTH metric (EEARTH) is proposed to provide one intuitive rating. In addition, an integrated calibration process based on the physical-based thresholds and subject matter experts (SMEs)' knowledge is developed to select the metric parameters. Two real-world examples are employed to demonstrate the effectiveness and advantages of the EEARTH metric.