FEM simulation supported knowledge enabled engineering in high strength steel car body design

With an increasing number of and also more complex demands on today’s automobiles the need for fast and accurate simulations to support the Engineering Design (ED) process is getting more important. The demands that are put on the automotive designs are often contradictory i.e. weight against stiffness, and no one optimal set of solutions can be found, rather a trade-off situation. At Volvo Cars Corporation, known all over the world for their safety policy, the advancement to more high strength materials is causing new problems for the engineers. As widely known, a steel material that has been exposed to plastic deformation will suffer hardening in those areas. The work in this paper, exemplified in a deployed demonstrator, show that it is possible to combine forming and crashworthiness simulations in an automated way to make advanced simulation accessible to more people in the product development process. The Knowledge Enabled Engineering (KEE) demonstrator combines forming and crashworthiness simulations for dealing with the constant trade-off in ED.Godkänd; 2004; Bibliografisk uppgift: IMECE2004-61584; 20061120 (tobias