Lightweight Design and Evaluation for Cab-in-White of Heavy-Duty Truck

The weight of a heavy-duty-truck is one of the most important indexes to evaluate the lightweight design level of the cab. The domestic heavy-duty-truck studied in this chapter is high-roof with one and a half seat space, which is overweight by 10 % compared with the same type of truck aboard. In order to reduce vehicle weight, improve fuel economy, the lightweight design of the cab is carried out. In this chapter, topology optimization and size optimization methods are applied to realize the lightweight design for the cab-in-white of a heavy-duty-truck, and the weight is reduced by 46 kg. Next, the comparative analysis show that the strength, stiffness and the natural vibration characteristics of lightweight designed cab are essentially the same with the original, and the passive safety meets ECE R29 regulatory requirements. On this basis, this chapter proposes the lightweight coefficient of the cab-in-white of a heavy-duty-truck as a evaluation index for lightweight design, used in the lightweight analysis and evaluation for cab-in-white of a heavy-duty-truck.