Spot weld connections are used extensively in the automotive industry to join panels of automotive structures. Spot weld connections play a very vital role in the overall structural rigidity and integrity of the Body in White. The spot weld connections and layout have direct impact on functionability of automotive structure and capital investment for robots, guns and operators.
There is continuous pressure on automotive engineers to reduce the number of spot weld connections in a structure without compromising on the structural performance across various disciplines such as crash, NVH & durability.
Hence the need is felt to develop a generic and systematic CAE simulation procedure which will guide the designer towards arriving at an optimum design, with minimum number of spot weld connections, which meet all the performance requirements of the structure.
This paper describes the complexity in considering number of spot weld connections as a design variable and the way to deal with, using proposed process. The objective of this study is to develop an optimization procedure wherein ‘number of spot weld connections’ can be treated as a design variable along with other design variables like thickness and shapes. The process can be used across various disciplines involved in the development of the BIW structure. Contrary to the existing methods found in literature which operate only with single discipline and single objective, this process can be used in multi-objective and multi-disciplinary optimization problems.
Case study of spot welds connection optimization of a truck cabin is demonstrated using this process.