Abstract
Increasing amounts of composite materials are used in automotive applications. Current design processes in the automotive industry are not readily applicable to composite design. Composite Design methods from the aerospace industry are problematic to employ in the automotive industry due to significantly different production volumes and development times. The development approach presented herein aims to solve this issue by taking into account production system specific considerations. This is illustrated with Manufacturing Variations (MV’s), which can affect mechanical performance of composite materials. Several composite vehicle sideframes containing specific MV’s were manufactured. A subset was then tested for their structural impact performance, while another subset was analyzed for the MV’s within the components. The observed MV’s were then introduced into a simulation model and the results were compared to a base simulation without MV’s. The base simulation did not predict the test results accurately, while the simulation with MV’s gave excellent agreement with the experimental results.
KEYWORDS – Design, Manufacturing, Automotive, Modelling, Impact