2. Development of Automotive Body Parts in Multi-Material Design—Processes and Tools

Besides the various opportunities of multi-material design, such as weight reduction or function integration, additional challenges occur within the design process. On the one hand, the rising complexity of multi-material body parts requires an additional assistance for the designer. On the other hand, it is of great importance to estimate the developed concepts’ properties—environmental properties in particular—at a very early stage of development in order to focus on promising concepts. To solve these challenges, this chapter introduces a procedure for the development of multi-material body parts on different levels of abstraction. It aims at reducing the design task’s complexity already at a very early stage of design. Among all considered properties, the focus is especially on the environmental properties over the entire life cycle. The procedure is applied on two body parts of the SuperLIGHT-CAR in a case study in order to develop multi-material body parts and validate the procedure as well as the additional tools developed within the project.