Abstract:

According to the fact that the skeleton of the integral vehicle body is mainly made up of slender bars and the load capacity of the bar is much better than that of any nonaxial loaded components, a lightweight design concept was proposed for vehicle body based on the optimization of internal forces in structure. The force flow in the vehicle body structure was analyzed to obtain the load bearing of the integral structure and its major components, the regions of high stress and low stress were found, and the internal forces and stresses in these regions were analyzed. The lightweight potential was tapped from the optimization of force bearing pattern. As a case example, a lightweight optimization was made for a integral coach body, and the mass of the body was reduced by about 220 kg due to the reduction of the highest stress.

Key words: vehicle engineering, integral vehicle body structure, internal force optimization, lightweight design