Application of Simulation in Weight Reduction for Automotive Industry

What if everything in this world is well-designed?

Wait!! What?? I could have saved millions if I designed it correctly??
The kind of over-designed and under-designed are happening every day in the automotive industry, if you want to put an end to it, and save yourself or your company millions of dollars from production, you might be interested to read the following.

Application of Simulation in Weight Reduction for Automotive Industry

The automotive industry is blooming more rapidly than any other industry with the high demand for lightweight components. This is primarily influenced by the drive towards reducing fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. A lot of the research nowadays is concerned about how to satisfy the requirement as a stringent emission regulation has also been put in place to mitigate the adverse effects of global warming.

Several weight reduction methods such as material substitution and topology optimization had been proposed and reviewed based on the cost and strength of the product. Therefore, an important question to be considered in this case is how automotive product designer works to meet the ever-changing market demand for lightweight products while reducing the manufacturing cost and maintaining product strength at the same time.

Material substitution in Design Study

Nowadays, lightweight materials like aluminums, magnesium and titanium are commonly used to substitute traditional heavy materials such as steel. These weight-saving contributes in a way that reduces fuel consumption and consequently reduces greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

However, despite offering the benefits of lightweight and bringing in excellent strength to weight ratio as well as high product efficiency, material substitution has a trade-off between light-weighting and high production cost. The lightweight material itself is generally expensive and can only be implemented when there are very high expected returns.

In this case, the design study helps to simulate the model with different materials and eliminate those that will cause the failure. In addition, the automotive designer may utilize these data to compare the cost-effectiveness of each material in terms of procurement and manufacturing between varieties of material.

Geometry optimization in Topology Analysis

Topology optimization is an optimization tool that aims to provide the automotive designer with a quick insight into the geometry of the product. It helps to interpret the results and suggest the most optimum geometry for the model based on the given constraint such as frequency and safety factors. The automotive designer might utilize this data to optimize the vehicle in terms of size and structural support of the vehicle.

As a numerical approach, it calculates the possible case of the domain subjected to different functions such as stiffness, deformation while reducing material usage at the same time. In addition, the suggested result can be saved into a separate file to further modify it. With the aid of topology study, the automotive designer can locate the most ideal shape as fast as possible and speed up the entire project speed. The design engineer can further convert the file into a certain format for 3D printing usage or as a guide of material removal for a traditional manufacturing process.

Wrapping Up

In short, reducing vehicle weight is a significant factor in reducing fuel consumption nowadays. Two main weight reduction techniques which are material substitution and topology optimization sometime will be adopted together to maximize the benefits of each technology. With the help of SOLIDWORKS Simulation, engineers can optimize their design, reducing the manufacturing cost of design as well as enhancing product durability in a better way.

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