A Method for Body Joint Stiffness Evaluation and Target Setting

The body joint stiffness plays an important role in achieving vehicle attribute targets. One of the major drawbacks of joint stiffness evaluation is the lack of a rigorous criterion to assess whether the stiffness is proper for a body structure. This paper presents a general joint stiffness metric based on Hooke's law to better evaluate the stiffness of a body joint. A strategy for target setting of body joint stiffness was developed for vehicle body design. Finally, a vehicle body example was presented to demonstrate the proposed methodology.