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The desire for greater fuel efficiency and reduced emissions have accelerated a shift from traditional materials to design solutions that more closely match materials and their properties with key applications. The Multi-Material Lightweight Vehicle (MMLV) Project presents cutting edge engineering that meets future challenges in a concept vehicle with weight and life-cycle assessment savings. These results significantly contribute to achieving fuel reduction and to meeting future Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFÉ) regulations without compromising vehicle performance or occupant safety.

With the continuing challenges of future fuel economy targets carbon fiber composite materials are one facet of a lightweighting strategy to enable reduced fuel consumption. In general, use of lightweight materials such as carbon fiber composites in vehicle design generates vehicle NVH performance degradation. To address this potential issue at the design phase, there is a need to develop correlated CAE models for carbon fiber vehicle parts to evaluate the NVH impact of carbon fiber composite material use in vehicle design. To develop correlated CAE models for lightweight vehicle design with the use of carbon fiber composite vehicle body parts, an experimental study was conducted to determine the material and NVH characteristics of the carbon fiber composite materials. In this paper, the damping properties and NVH modal analysis results for structural carbon fiber thermoset composite panels and body parts (B-pillar upper insert and B-pillar lower insert) is presented.