Balancing of wheel suspension packaging, performance and weight

Abstract

In today’s automotive industry there is a growing demand for more fuel efficient vehicles and reduced development times. These trends are driven by stricter environmental regulations, a growing environmental awareness, and increasing technology development which pushes the vehicle manufacturers to produce lighter vehicles in shorter time to stay competitive. The aim with this master thesis is to find a process and tools to balance packaging conflicts. Finding an optimized and balanced components that fulfils the requirements in an early phase of the product development is a prerequisite for enabling more competitive lead times, costs, weights and minimizing the risk for late design changes. A complex system, such as a wheel suspension, requires a process that enables CAE driven development where a natural part is optimization and a tight coupling between design and verification engineers. Today, the development of the wheel suspension is carried out by developing concepts based on engineering experience which are then verified against predefined requirements. If the concepts do not fulfill the requirements they are iteratively updated and re-verified. This process lack collaboration which lead to increased number of iterations and more resource consumption before a feasible design is obtained. This thesis work has been an initiation of CAE driven development and design volume optimization at the Wheel Suspension department at Volvo Cars. The thesis work consisted of two parts, where the first part was to develop a workflow process for the wheel suspension development where optimization is an integrated part of the process. The second part was a technical working process of how to balance packaging conflicts through performing shape and topology optimization on multiple components simultaneously, to obtain system level optimization.