Abstract

Hybridised road vehicles constitute a major enabler to reach future CO2 targets and reduce greenhouse gas emissions in general, and play an important role in ensuring better air quality in urban areas and energy savings. Anyway, batteries and electric components represent a major load for a vehicle, so that lightweight design is a major target for automotive engineers. Lightweight materials, such as aluminium, are more and more adopted in chassis design even if the assembly process represents a challenge from a technological point of view, especially due to the distortions caused by the welding process. Thermal-Elastic-Plastic (TEP) FEA simulations, which are capable to provide acceptable results, require high computational efforts, for simulating complex geometries. To overcome this problem, in this paper, the local-global approach has been adopted. A top class car automotive aluminum chassis has been chosen as a case study. As a novel contribution, a sensitivity analysis has been added, in order to include tolerances in future FEA models.