Lightweight Design Using Drag-and-drop

Building lighter vehicles is one of the most important ways to save energy and protect the environment. However, lightweight construction can also be a tricky thing: a door developer may save a kilogram in weight in his work package - but this does not make the overall vehicle lighter, but heavier, because the modified door affects stability and reinforcements are required elsewhere on the bodywork weigh much more than was saved on the door.

In reality, such a result will hardly go into series production because you will notice such wrong turns in good time. But if the findings of Tobias Lüdeke's dissertation can be put into practice, the development should no longer lead to such dead ends. One could even look specifically for lightweight construction approaches that reinforce each other and also take the costs into account.

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Primary weight saving

In 2010, the mechatronics engineer started his doctoral thesis at Saarland University. In addition to his work as a research assistant at the chair for construction technology of Prof. Dr.-Ing. He researched Michael Vielhaber's current development processes in order to improve them at the end with his new system.

One of the first findings: developers generally only deal with lightweight construction when a physical or virtual prototype is available. Lüdeke emphasizes that it is clearly too late, "because the developers have the greatest opportunities to influence weight, but also costs and other aspects at the very beginning of development, if the product is designed based on the requirements, long before Prototypes exist”.

The problem: There is little knowledge of the impact that changes to the product in this early phase will ultimately have on weight and, for example, costs. Tobias Lüdeke therefore painstakingly designed a system with many formulas. They make it possible to calculate what consequences a modified design will have on various properties of the end product.

Tobias Lüdeke has proven that the formulas work. However, they have only given rough information so far: Does my design change make the product lighter or heavier? In order to be able to provide more precise information, further research and development steps are required.

Content of the article:

• Page 1: Lightweight construction using drag-and-drop
• Page 2: Secondary weight saving

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