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In the primary design step, a well established design guide would be useful for vehicle body design engineers, to avoid trial and error for the desired design. In this paper, an integrated design program B-SOPT is presented. The B-SOPT is composed of vibration analysis, section property analysis, and section optimization. Vibration analysis procedure is necessary to evaluate the target frequency constraints for optimization. B.I.W. vibration analysis model can be generated and joint stiffness can also be generated automatically by explicit formula derived from using RSM (Response surface method) in the B-SOPT. The presented design program provides a systematic design guide for the vehicle side body structure. For design engineers, graphic user interface environment is developed with the visual C++ program. A B.I.W design example is given to demonstrate the design procedure using the B-SOPT program.

This paper describes the optimal design process of the steering column system and the supporting system. At the initial concept stage of development process, a design guide is proposed to obtain sufficient stiffness of the steering system while reducing idle vibration sensitivity of the system. Case studies on resonance isolation are summarized, in which separated vibration modes among systems by applying Vibration Mode Map at the initial stage of design process. This study also makes it possible to provide design guideline for optimal dynamic damper system using CAE (computer aided engineering) analysis. The damper FE (finite element) model is added to vehicle model to analyze the relation between the frequency and the sensitivity of steering column system. This analysis methodology enables target performance achievement in early design stage and reduction of damper tuning activity after proto car test stage.

With the recent development of technologies for interpreting vibration and noise of vehicles, it has become possible for carmakers to reduce idle vibration and driving noise in the phase of preceding development. Thus, the issue of noise generation is drawing keen attention from production of prototype car through mass-production development. J. D. Power has surveyed the levels of customer satisfaction with all vehicles sold in the U.S. market and released the Initial Quality Study (IQS) index. As a growing number of emotional quality-related items are added to the IQS evaluation index, it is necessary to secure a sufficiently high quality level of low-frequency speaker sound against rattle noise. It is required to make a preceding review on the package tray panel, which is located at the bottom of the rear glass where the woofer speakers of a passenger sedan are installed, the door module panel in which the door speakers are built.

The ride and noise characteristics of a vehicle is significantly affected by vibration transferred to the body through the chassis mounting points from the engine and suspension. It is known that body attachment stiffness is an important factor of idle noise and road noise for NVH performance improvement. And high stiffness helps to improve the flexibility of bushing rate tuning. This paper presents the procedure of body attachment stiffness analysis, which contains the correlation between experimental test and FEA. It is concluded that the most important factors are panel thickness, section type and mounting area size. This procedure makes it possible to find out the weak points before proto car and to suggest proper design guideline in order to improve the stiffness of body structure.

Design optimization of a vehicle is required to increase a product value for noise and vibration performances and for a fuel-efficient car. This paper describes the development process of a high stiffness and lightweight vehicle. A parameter study is carried out at the initial stage of design using the mother car, and a design guide with a good performance is achieved early prior to the development of the proto car. Influences of body stiffness based on the relative weight ratio of the floor and side structures are analyzed. Results show that bending and torsional stiffness has a significant effect on weight distribution ratio. Influences of the distribution of side joint stiffness are analyzed through numerical experiments. Results reveal that the stiffness difference between the upper and lower parts should be small to increase the stiffness of a body.