Knowledge Enabled Engineering Applied to Car Body Design

With an increasing number of and also more complex demandson today’s automobiles the need for fast and accuratesimulations to support the Engineering Design (ED) process isgetting more important. The demands that are put on theautomotive designs are often contradictory i.e. weight againststiffness, and no one optimal set of solutions can be found,rather a trade-off situation. At Volvo Cars Corporation, knownall over the world for their safety policy, the advancement tomore high strength materials is causing new problems for theengineers. As widely known, a steel material that has beenexposed to plastic deformation will suffer hardening in thoseareas. The work in this paper, exemplified in a deployeddemonstrator, show that it is possible to combine forming andcrashworthiness simulations in an automated way to makeadvanced simulation accessible to more people in the productdevelopment process. The Knowledge Enabled Engineering(KEE) demonstrator combines forming and crashworthinesssimulations for dealing with the constant trade-off in ED.