Title: Rapid structural property evaluation system for car body advanced design

Authors: Wenbin Hou; Hongzhe Zhang; Wei Zhang; Ping Hu

Addresses: School of Automotive Engineering, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian 116024, China. ' School of Mechanical Engineering, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian 116024, China. ' School of Automotive Engineering, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian 116024, China. ' School of Automotive Engineering, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian 116024, China

Abstract: The Vehicle Concept Design (VCD) system has been implemented to estimate the structural property of car body rapidly in advanced design phase. In the system, the parametric frame model of car body-in-white was built by the method of template. The beam element was adopted to constitute a flexible FEM analysis model. The section database was built to store sections with real shape and the joint element was defined to simulate joints between beams. A multi-objective optimisation algorithm is provided, which would optimise design parameters. Finally, a case is given to show the precision and function of the system.

Keywords: car body design; parametric frame models; joint simulation; multi-objective optimisation; vehicle design; vehicle concept design; body in white; BIW; FEM; finite element method; modelling; structural properties; evaluation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJVD.2011.044723

International Journal of Vehicle Design, 2011 Vol.57 No.2/3, pp.242 - 253

Received: 28 Sep 2009
Accepted: 19 Jun 2010
Published online: 15 Apr 2015 *

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