2015 Outlook: Vehicle materials, structures to shed more weight

Have you ever heard the idiom, “Leave no stone unturned?” As vehicle designers and manufacturers deal with the current regulatory environment, they are increasingly looking under every stone for lightweighting opportunities. Today’s cars and trucks are shedding nuts and bolts, heavy fabrics, and weighty steel panels. Instead, they incorporate advanced materials for making vehicles lighter, from high-strength steel, aluminum, and composites for structural applications to lightweight foam and natural fibers in slimmer seats and instrument panels.

Through this kind of lightweight material substitution (LMS), the auto industry has made considerable progress, but not nearly enough yet to meet the 54.5mpg Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standard for 2025. In the years ahead, consumers will continue to find new materials and lighter components. To arrive at the finish line successfully, however, manufacturers also need to find ways to remove unnecessary material from the vehicle, without compromising performance or safety.

Optimization technology

Physically eliminating material – lightweight material reduction (LMR) – can involve making the walls of structures thinner and lighter, punching holes in metal to remove non-essential weight, or redesigning the entire look and configuration of a system or vehicle so that it uses less material.

The keys to applying this two-prong approach to vehicle engineering are determining exactly where material can be removed without affecting the strength, integrity, and durability of a vehicle; how much should be removed; and what the final shape of the components should be to produce the lightest system with the best performance at a viable cost.

Answering these questions is the role of optimization technology.

Increasingly, designers are using computer simulation tools, such as Opti-Struct from Altair, to define the optimal shape and size of vehicle components. These optimization tools evaluate the effects of using various materials to measure the tradeoff between performance and lighter weight, often coming up with entirely new configurations that they never would have considered on their own to produce a lightweight part.

Volkswagen used optimization to cut bracket weight by 22%. Tallent Automotive, a subsidiary of Spanish automotive supplier Gestamp, reduced the mass of a chassis by 25%. Ford Motor Co. used topology optimization to help decide on shape and material distribution, reducing the mass of a bracket by 27% while improving performance by nearly 30%. As a result of modifying this bracket, the company saved more than $1.1 million in the first year of production.

Suppliers and OEMs will likely be more creative in using optimization in 2015. Using technology at the early design stage, rather than simply to validate or change a prototype, reduces the time required to complete the design. Optimization simulations can produce a wide range of designs and recommend the best ones to serve as the basis for a lightweight component.

Advanced manufacturing

New manufacturing technologies, especially additive manufacturing or 3D printing, will allow designers to choose the purest lightweight design configuration.

In 2015, adoption of optimization technology will gain momentum in the race to drive weight out of vehicle components and bring them to market faster. Advanced technology will allow designers, engineers, and manufacturers to build sleeker and lighter vehicles to meet the challenge of 2025, offering new insights into the shape of things to come.

Altair
www.altair.com

About the author: David Mason is senior vice president of global automotive business at Altair and can be reached at info@altair.com.