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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.

In this paper, an optimization technique for thin walled beams of vehicle body structure is proposed. Stiffness of thin walled beam structure is characterized by the thickness and typical section shape of the beam structure. Approximate functions for the section properties such as area, area moment of inertia, and torsional constant are derived by using the response surface method. The approximate functions can be used for the optimal design of the vehicle body that consists of complicated thin walled beams. A passenger car body structure is optimized to demonstrate the proposed technique.

Design for six sigma (DFSS) with sigma based robust design will have a major influence on the future design, if it is applied during the conceptual design phase or design change phase. DFSS will result in more improved but less expensive quality products. This paper presents the implementation of DFSS for robust design of a brake judder of heavy-duty trucks. The problem of brake judder is typically caused by quality defects in manufacturing. However this quality problem can't be controlled deterministically and requires a design considering the uncertainty. In this paper sigma based robust design methodology is applied to improve the brake judder quality problem at the last step of DFSS. Results between conventional deterministic optimization and the proposed sigma based robust design are compared. The robust design by DFSS shows that the manufacturing cost may increase as the quality level increase.