Leveraging the increased use of Structural Adhesive in Automotive Body Structure
Design has many proven benefits. It is a well-known method used to enable weight
reduction in vehicle design and can also drive more efficient structural
performance during dynamic safety events. This is increasingly important as
vehicle safety standards increase, and as vehicle mass increases due to
electrification. Often the benefits of adhesive use are not fully optimized due
to unnecessary design redundancies or process driven redundancies. Design
redundancy; using both welds and adhesive, is often included because government
safety regulations require very robust validation of structures, and when
combined with the use of Process Quality Control methods such as Batch Control
and Sampling, can infer confidence in the design and process, but don’t ensure
it. This paper proposes a different and unique approach to Product Design and
Process Control, which will create an opportunity to eliminate redundancy, and
can unlock significant design and process operational and capital cost savings.
To truly ensure Quality Control of the structural adhesive bead, real-time
verification along with Adaptive Process Control (APC) of the dispensing process
is required. With fully guaranteed quality, design redundancies can be
eliminated, and the design and processes can be concurrently optimized. The
commitment to APC technology must happen very early in the Program, to enable an
early focused design optimization effort to minimize the number of spot welds
while maximizing structural adhesive use. Too often, the decision to invest in
enabling technology in the manufacturing process, is made without considering
design optimization. Also, the high-level decisions that can enable capital
investment and operating cost savings are often caught in complex organizational
finance processes. APC technology and equipment is purchased by Manufacturing
entities, but without the confirmed product variable cost savings being
identified early enough, the capital expenses won’t be justified or approved.
This paper seeks to unravel that Catch-22 issue. Very few vehicle manufacturers
are taking this pro-active step to commit to the use of APC technology in
dispensing early in a vehicle program. Most OEM manufacturers design products in
a very serial development process, design, tool, produce; with limited synergy
due to the very rapid design cycle. They are missing a readily available
opportunity to eliminate sub-optimization, added cost, added labor, and
redundancy. To accomplish full efficiency and optimization, requires very close
and early collaboration between the product design engineers and manufacturing
engineers, and cross-organizational agreement.