Benefit of Structural Adhesives in Full Car Crash Applications

Structural adhesives are widely used across the automotive industry for several reasons like scale-up of structural performance and enabling multi-material and lightweight designs. Development engineers know in general about the effects of adding adhesive to a spot-welded structure, but they want to quantify the benefit of adding adhesives on weight reduction or structural performance. A very efficient way is to do that by applying analytical tools. But, in most of the relevant non-linear load cases the classical lightweight theory can only help to get a basic understanding of the mechanics. For more complex load cases like full car crash simulations, the Finite Element Method (FEM) with explicit time integration is being applied to the vehicle development process. In order to understand the benefit of adding adhesives to a body structure upfront, new FEM simulation tools need to be established, which must be predictive and efficient. Therefore new FEM crash methods for structural adhesives have been investigated and validated with the help of test results. With these simulation tools, experienced FEM analysts can predict the benefits of adding adhesives into a vehicle structure on weight reduction or structural performance in advance with sufficient accuracy.