SAE 2011 World Congress

Authors: Juan P. Leiva
Publication Date: April 12, 2011
Abstract:

Current difficult economic environment and intense competition in the global automobile market impose automobile companies and their engineers the need to design and build vehicles that perform better than their previous models, that are lighter, more fuel efficient, more quiet, pollute less, and yet be cheaper to manufacture. In this presentation, different optimization methods and techniques that can be used to address some of these issues are discussed. Methods such as sizing, shape, topology, topometry, topography, and freeform optimization are described and examples of their use are presented. The presentation concludes that today optimization methods are mature and can be used at different stages of the design process of vehicles.