Body Lightweight Design and Scalability with Structural Foam Solutions

In this paper polymer structural foams are being investigated in body structure applications. There are two major polymer foam technologies for structural applications: the well-known epoxy based insert solutions and the PUR injection foams.

Here we focus only on the PUR injection foams and its structural applications. It will be shown where such structural foams can be applied in the body structure in order to enable lightweight design or to scale the structural performance. Reliable CAE methods for crash simulation as well as several body structure application examples will be presented and evaluated.