Lightweight design of an automotive lower control arm using topology optimization for forming process

Abstract

The global environmental regulations have become very strict nowadays, thus most car manufacturers aim to fulfil such restrictions by different strategies including lightweight technologies that contain design, advanced materials and manufacturing. Hereby, optimally designed geometries of structural components needs to be conformed to their functional requirements and manufacturing process. In this work, a topology optimization (TO) was performed for weight reduction and performance improvement of a lower control arm (LCA) of vehicle suspension. First, FE simulations of the recently used LCA were performed under different load cases according to the actual application. The resulted stress distribution and overall stiffness were gathered as the baseline reference. Then, TO procedure was carried out and critical regions for load carrying were classified. In addition, the member-size constraint was applied to enable a LCA layout, which can be likely produced by metal forming process. The introduced optimization method serves as a guidance in practice for the lightweight design of other automotive stamping parts.