The use of lightweight materials not only provides environmental advantages, but also offers an approach to the improvement of vehicle economics which is affected by increasing fuel costs and gross vehicle weight. The body structure of a vehicle still allows the realisation of significant weight reduction. Furthermore, use of different lightweight materials in the forward car structure enables improvement of axle load distribution and thus vehicle dynamics. While fuel consumption is a strong purchase criterion for the end customer in this segment, the compact class has not seen the realisation of such multi-material concepts yet. The Institut für Kraftfahrwesen Aachen (ika) of RWTH Aachen University is involved in different projects to integrate multi-material lightweight concepts into compact class vehicles, ranging from steel-aluminium hybrid designs, which are already known from the premium class, to complex multi-material designs. Within the presented project two different concepts for a vehicle front structure in multi-material design have been developed. The progressive, weight-optimised concept led to a weight reduction of approximately 38%, compared with the conventional structure of the reference vehicle. The weight of a slightly more conservative, cost-optimised concept could be reduced by 18%, while crash and stiffness performance of both concepts were at least as good as that of the reference. For weight comparison, only modified parts were taken into account. In addition to the development of the concepts the development of a material model for the simulation of adhesive bonding under crash load was developed. This model is based on test results obtained by using different test samples under different loads. A cost analysis of both the reference structure and the newly developed concepts concluded the project.
A lightweight body front structure in multi-material design
2007
19 Seiten, 20 Bilder, 3 Quellen
Aufsatz (Konferenz)
Englisch
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