Work - Automotive
Light Weight Engineering of a Bus Body Structure
Nowadays there is a great demand in automotive domain for Light Weight Engineering to reduce the fuel consumption & Operational cost. Zuti has been supporting the OEM’s to design, develop & validate the structures with the required performance using market standard tools like ProE, HyperMesh ,OptiStruct. The OEM has come up with a requirement to reduce the weight of a Bus Frame used in one of its export based Bus Models. Zuti has taken up the responsibility of the Optimization process, supported the client till the final prototype.
Challenge: Perform the Optimization analysis of the entire Super Structure with conditions on Bending & Torsional frequency, Static stiffness, maximum allowable Stress but using the material, standard sections & thickness available with the vendors listed by the OEM and is essential to get at least 10 % of mass reduction and less than that is not worthy for investment.
Solution: The final super structure is Optimized with mass reduction of about 18% and enhanced the performance parameters like Stiffness, natural frequencies slightly by about 3-5%.
Benefits Zuti followed a systematic approach in which the Base line design of the super structure provided by the OEM is analysed and various performance parameters like Bending & Torsional stiffness, Bending & Torsional Modes that affect the ride comfort ,stability are defined to benchmark the Optimization. The Bus frame is modelled with shell elements and appropriately weld connections are defined as per DFA. The thickness of the structural frame members are taken as variables with the limits governed by the Vendors Catalogue. The Optimization model was built and run using MFD & SQP. The Optimized model is further verified for roll over stability (30 degree),Braking conditions using inertia relief and nonlinear methods.
