The present work explains an innovative design methodology that allows efficient optimizations of vehicle body panels and treatments towards shorter development time and improved vehicle Noise and Vibration Harshness (NVH) characteristics.
This tool named GOLD (Genetic Optimization for Lighter Damping), internally developed by Rieter Automotive, can be embedded into vehicle Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) design flow and can be then used in providing design and platform component sharing guidance information before prototype vehicles are available.
GOLD is able to detect the optimal design of vehicle panel shape and damping packages with respect to NVH targets, by means of vibro-acoustic simulations. The core of this tool are the Genetic algorithms (GAs) which are heuristic methods which have been already successfully used, in several research fields, to solve search and optimization problems with a very large number of variables.
Typical design variables, that can be faced into the optimization loop, include the geometry and the materials configuration of the damping viscoelastic layers, as well as potential structural shape modifications of the body panels, like the application of soap film layouts, embossments and ribs.
The whole iteration and FE model generation and updating process is automatically performed and controlled by special operators embedded in the GOLD software.
The tool has already proven to provide high improvements when solving damping optimization problems of full vehicle structures, and one of this cases will be presented here. A component level optimization takling at the same time damping and shape design variables is also presented, taking into account weight constraints and performance objective functions.