TY - JOUR AB - Purpose– In the event of a crash involving a car, its seats, together with their backrests and head supports, ensure the safety of the passengers. The filling material used for such a car seat is normally made of polyurethane foam. To simulate the behaviour of the seat assembly during a crash, the material characteristics of the seat-filling foam should be appropriately modelled. The purpose of this paper is to present a method, with which the proper parameter values of the selected material model for the seat-filling foam can be easily determined. Design/methodology/approach– In the study, an experiment with the specimen from seat-filling foam was carried out. The results from this experiment were the basis for the determination of the parameter values of the low-density-foam material model, which is often used in crash-test simulations. Two different numerical optimisation algorithms – a genetic algorithm and a gradient-descent algorithm – were coupled with LS-DYNA explicit simulations to identify the material parameters. Findings– The paper provides comparison of two optimisation algorithms and discusses the engineering applicability of the results. Originality/value– This paper presents an approach for the identification of the missing parameter values of the highly non-linear material model, if these cannot be easily determined directly from experimental data. VL - 31 IS - 7 SN - 0264-4401 DO - 10.1108/EC-03-2013-0100 UR - https://doi.org/10.1108/EC-03-2013-0100 AU - Škrlec Andrej AU - Klemenc Jernej AU - Fajdiga Matija PY - 2014 Y1 - 2014/01/01 TI - Parameter identification for a low-density-foam material model using numerical optimisation procedures T2 - Engineering Computations PB - Emerald Group Publishing Limited SP - 1532 EP - 1549 Y2 - 2024/03/28 ER -