Abstract
A structural analysis has not been applied to many automobile parts because of the difficulty of their numerical modeling of complicated shapes. This paper presents that those difficult applications of structural analyses become possible by using voxel models, which is automatically generated from CAD data. Voxel models are easily made, but the size of a computation is dramatically increased if they are used. To realize such a huge computation, a high speed structural analysis code is developed for vector/parallel processors. An advantage of a voxel approach to a topology-shape optimization method using a homogenization method is also presented with several examples including a ideal framework of an entire vehicle body.