Life Cycle Design & Engineering of Lightweight Multi-Material Automotive Body Parts

The present book presents selected results of the research project MultiMaK2 that has been carried out at the Research Campus Open Hybrid LabFactory in Wolfsburg, Germany. The project aimed at providing innovative engineering methods and tools that help to bring forward lightweight automotive body parts with low environmental impacts over their life cycle. The engineering of lightweight body parts is influenced by innovative materials and production technologies that enable new designs. However, the indluence on resulting life cycle impacts is not transparent at engineering stages. To bridge that gap, the project promotes an integrated Life Cycle Design & Engineering when engineering lightweight automotive body parts. Therefore, the research fields of body part design, body part manufacturing as well as a concurrent life cycle engineering are introduced, and key research demands are formulated. On this basis, the subsequent chapters of this book present research results of the MultiMaK2 project.

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.

Multi-material-design is a promising approach for the automotive industry to operate economical lightweight design. Combining metallic materials with composites and short-fibre reinforced plastics enables to develop lightweight components with superior mechanical properties. One of the central challenges is that most car body developers in the automotive industry have gathered little experience with plastics, composites and multi-material designs. One approach of product development to meet this challenge is the provision of knowledge, for example through design rules and design principles. The scope of this chapter is to provide knowledge for developing multi-material designs. First, relevant knowledge is identified, and an access concept for the design rules is developed. Furthermore, what will be developed is a text similarity algorithm for identifying similar rules. Afterwards, the knowledge management system will be prototypically implemented and applied to two case studies.

The manufacturing of multi-material components for the automotive industry adds additional process steps to the traditional process chain while also employing new manufacturing technologies. Both factors usually lead to higher production costs as well as higher energy demands and environmental impacts. Cyber physical production systems (CPPS) are a promising approach to support the design of multi-material components as well as the dimensioning and operation of the production processes. In the following article, the levers of CPPS for the manufacturing of multi-material components are discussed and illustrated within an automated calculation of component-specific energy consumption.

Recent years introduced process and material innovations in the design and manufacturing of lightweight body parts. Lightweight materials and new manufacturing processes often carry a higher environmental burden in earlier life cycle stages. The prospective life cycle evaluation of newly developed manufacturing processes and related production systems remains to this day a challenging task. Against this background, this chapter introduces a modeling and simulation approach for determining the potential environmental impacts of new manufacturing processes and production systems for multi-material lightweight body parts.

Designing lightweight hybrid multi-material parts for automotive body applications is subject to a large solution space. This results in a large variety of concept alternatives that are able to fulfil the technical performance criteria. Towards prioritizing eco-efficient concepts, life cycle environmental impacts need to be determined at an early design stage. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a system analysis methodology that enables a quantitative analysis of energy and resource flows and associated environmental impacts. LCA models need to reflect the application and combination of different materials, manufacturing process chains and end-of-life treatments as well as different scenarios within the vehicle use stage. At the same time, LCA models need to cope with limited information availability at this early stage of design. Therefore, the current chapter provides an overview on methodological aspects in evaluating lightweight body part concepts for different life cycle scenarios. A software toolchain is implemented and applied in the course of two case studies.

Engineering processes for innovative and eco-efficient automotive components show a high degree of labour division. Domain-specific information needs to be exchanged between actors and serves as input for decision-making, e.g. information on part performance, weight, cost or environmental impact. In current engineering practice, this cross-domain communication tends to be streamlined up to the level of selected and simplified KPI that represent the progress of individual disciplines. This hinders a holistic improvement of products and processes. Research within the MultiMaK2 project emphasizes the importance of a joint knowledge building between engineering disciplines and aims at creating a cross-domain understanding of root causes for hotspots and goal conflicts. Therefore, the Life Cycle Design & Engineering Lab was established at the Open Hybrid LabFactory. It objectifies the methodological approach of visual analytics through domain spanning software toolchains, centralized data acquisition, analytics methods as well as a variety of visualization tools and hardware elements that serve the described goals.