CONCEPTUAL DESIGN AND INITIAL SHAPE PREDICTION OF AUTOMOTIVE STRUCTURE USING INTEGRATED CAE APPROACH

Conceptual design of automotive structures has received substantial research attention in recent years in order to speed up vehicle development and innovation. Although several structural optimization methods have been employed in concept design, there still exists lack of efficient design tools to produce initial design shapes with less problem dependency, less computation-intensive analysis and more design flexibility. In this paper, an innovative Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) approach based on an integrated Genetic Algorithms(GA) and Finite Element (FE) optimization system has been studied and implemented for efficient conceptual design of automotive suspension system related structural part. Integration of GA provides the method a great amount of design flexibility and robustness that increases possibility of finding more efficient and innovative design shapes of the structure.