Abstract

As focus on the world climate rises, so does the demand for ever more environmentally friendly technologies. The response from the automotive industry includes vehicles whose primary propulsion systems are not based upon fossil fuels, namely Full Electrical Vehicles (FEV). There is an opportunity to design and engineer new innovative FEV architectures, whilst minimising their mass in order to further reduce carbon emissions. This paper proposes an engineering process for optimising new FEV lightweight vehicle architecture based on a technique entitled topology optimisation, which extracts the idealised load paths for a given set of load cases. Subsequently shape and size optimisations are conducted in order to obtain detailed information of localised vehicle geometry such as individual BIW cross-sections. The research discusses each individual step of the overall process including successes, limitations and further engineering challenges and complications which will need to be resolved in order to automate the vehicle architecture design to include e.g. durability and (dynamic) crashworthiness performance.