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The automotive industry is one of the drivers of CAE-based virtual product development. Due to a highly competitive market, development of innovative, high quality products within a short time is necessary and it is only possible by using virtual prototyping. It is important to note that increased application of virtual prototyping itself increases the necessity to perform robustness studies. If the number of hardware tests has to be reduced, it is essential to implement the scatter, which is always present in these tests (such as loads, material, geometry), into the computational model. Consequently, probabilistic methods using CAE-based stochastic analysis have to be utilized in order to quantify robustness, safety and serviceability. Brake noise is one of the most important problems in the automobile industry due to the high warranty costs. The generation of brake noise is due to the development of instabilities in the brake system.

In the automotive industry, crash analysis plays an important role in the virtual product development of the design of the car body. The minimization of weight and competing requirements from several load cases have to be adjusted as optimal as possible. Consequently, high safety limits cannot be kept while maintaining all requirements. Therefore, the assurance of robustness of the optimized design against unavoidable scatters of crash test constraints, production constraints and material constraints in preferably early stages of product development becomes more and more important. Therefore, numerical robustness analysis is recommended as method of stochastic analysis in virtual product development. Robustness analysis is primarily carried out to determine the variation range of significant response variables and their evaluation by using definitions of system robustness due to the unavoidable scatter of design parameters.