Delivering World Class Chassis Design

Adrian Chapple, Dr. Adam Towse

ThyssenKrupp Automotive Tallent Chassis Ltd
Groat Road, Aycliffe Industrial Estate, Newton Aycliffe, County Durham, DL5 6EP
adrian.chapple@thyssenkrupp.com, adam.towse@thyssenkrupp.com

Abstract
This paper details the extensive use of CAE optimisation technology at ThyssenKrupp Automotive Tallent
Chassis Ltd (TKA). There are a number of trends in the automotive business that are presenting great
challenges, these include severe cost pressures from OEM’s, platform commonisation and reduced vehicle
development cycle time. The use of optimisation is critical for TKA to maintain its competitiveness, this paper
deals with more advanced concepts of optimisation by extending into the severely non-linear region of analysis
types.

Keywords: Optimisation, Crashworthiness, HyperStudy, Radioss.

1.0 Introduction
ThyssenKrupp Automotive Tallent Chassis Ltd. design and manufacture chassis components for a wide variety
of OEM’s from their main design office situated in Newton Aycliffe, County Durham, UK. Products are wholly
chassis parts, including front / rear subframes, engine cradles, rear twist beams, suspension links etc; basically
anything and everything providing primary load-bearing structure to the front or rear modules of vehicles.
Typical examples are shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Typical Chassis Components Fabricated using Pressed / Welded High Strength Steel

Most products from the County Durham site are fabricated using pressed / welded sheet steel with ancillary
components such as bought-out parts (e.g. bushes, steering racks, anti-roll bars, balljoints etc.) bought-in and
assembled either on site or as part of just-in-sequence operations at the final assembly OEM plants.

The competitive nature of the automotive industry demands continual innovation to enable significant reductions
in the design cycle time whilst satisfying ever increasing design functionality requirements (e.g. minimising
mass, maximising stiffness etc). Optimization technology provides a scientific approach to automatically
determining the most efficient design within competitive time constraints.

© Altair Engineering 2007 14-1

2.0 Non-linear Optimisation at Concept

2.1 ARB Design

The anti-roll bar (ARB) is used in front and rear suspensions to control roll in vehicle manoeuvres. An example
is shown below ~ the bar is attached to the frame of the car through the rear subframe. The ends of the bar are
attached to the moving suspension component, in this case the trailing arm. A bush is used to attach the bar to
the frame with the load input via short droplinks which are, in general, pinned via the use of balljoints. (Figure2).

Figure 2: Typical Subframe Assembly with ARB Highlighted

2.2 Design Task

A design program with a large OEM led to the investigation of a proposed ARB design. Initially a MBD (Multi
Body Dynamics) model of the vehicle system was showing unstable behaviour, and it was unclear if this was
valid or a symptom of the simplifications made to the system MBD model. A beam model representation was
developed for the ARB system. Bush stiffness and suitable joint types were included along with appropriate
dashpots to add some numerical stability into the system. The road load data (RLD) displacements measured
from test vehicles were played through the ends of the ARB and the response of the bar measured. The
analysis was carried out using ABAQUS with large deflection analysis to accurately represent bending of the bar
(Figure 3).

Figure 3: ARB FEA Model Schematic

2.3 ARB Instability

During loading of the bar a particular wheel position and movement was found to produce an unstable condition.
(Figure 4) shows the end of the ARB link inverting, a phenomenon known as ‘toggling’. The vertical reaction
force that it produces reduces from maximum to zero very quickly, with significant implications for the overall
stability of the vehicle. Furthermore, the lateral displacement of the ARB end would almost certainly produce an
internal foul between parts causing further damage to the suspension. Clearly toggling is a potential safety
hazard and must be avoided, but the problem cannot be tackled using linear analysis, the large-scale rotation of
both bar and droplinks is critical in understanding the onset of toggling.

© Altair Engineering 2007 Delivering World Class Chassis Design 14-2

 Figure 4: ARB Instability Showing Vertical Link Inverting Under Driving Conditions

2.4 Design Optimisation

The ABAQUS model was read into Altair HyperMesh and 5 symmetrical shape variables were produced using
HyperMorph (Figure 5). HyperMorph is a mesh morphing tool available as part of HyperWorks. It allows the
user to manipulate orphan solid or shell meshes without CAD input - previously, if a different ARB geometry was
needed, the CAD designer was tasked with creating this.

The HyperMorph tool allows this to happen wholly within the CAE environment, while also being linked in with
optimisation to achieve specific goals (e.g. stress / stiffness / mass reduction).

In this case, and unusually for a Tier 1 supplier, the design was not constrained by surrounding fixed geometry
due to the early involvement in the project. This allowed the use of large shape vectors and displacements, +/-
50mm were used for each perturbation. Also, the use of beam elements allowed large movements without
mesh distortion. The model was also constrained to be symmetric for obvious reasons.

Figure 5: ARB Model with Shape Variables Indicated

Two rotational constraints were added to the vertical link joints so that their rotation should not exceed 15° and
damage the joint under operation (this was the limit of the joint intended for use). A minimum force limit
transmitted down the link at maximum twist was also imposed in the optimisation model. The objective was set
to minimise the mass of the bar, this also minimised cost by reducing the length of the bar. Altair’s HyperStudy
was used to drive the optimisation, wrapping around ABAQUS in this case.

Using the Adaptive Response Surface Method (HyperOpt) the model was optimised. The HyperOpt results
shown in (Figure 6) show large fluctuations in the responses and after 100 runs no solution to the problem
could be found. This shows that for an extremely non-linear system, with large bifurcations in the structural
response, the normal ‘hill climbing’ method is not appropriate.

2.5 Hammersly DOE

A Hammersly Design of Experiments (DoE) study with 100 runs was set up and controlled using HyperStudy.
The DoE method was used for following reasons;

© Altair Engineering 2007 Delivering World Class Chassis Design 14-3

• Populate the design space to identify regions or new starting points when local maxima may exist. These
points would hopefully be far enough away from “toggling” locations to prevent further HyperOpt runs from
getting caught up in the fluctuating loop seen above.

• Follow the method of Joanne R. Zuzelski [1] where Design of Experiments (DoE) method was used as a
screening exercise to reduce the number of design variables. This would allow the complexity of the problem
to be reduced and hopefully increasing the chance of finding a feasible solution.

• Simply play the numbers game and hope that within 100 designs a solution could be found.

Figure 6: HyperOpt Response Plot Showing Fluctuating Results and no Solution Found

Figure 7: Hammersly DOE Residual Scatter Plots

The DOE residual scatter (Figure 7) indicates that 100 runs was not enough to accurately represent the two
rotational responses, however, a good representation of the z reaction force and of course the mass was
achieved. The amount of scatter meant that an approximation could not be accurately generated to directly find

© Altair Engineering 2007 Delivering World Class Chassis Design 14-4

a solution to the optimisation problem. The 100 runs also did not include any one data point that achieved all of
the required constraints ~ we still had no solution.

The ANOVA plot 1 (Figure 8) shows how nearly all of the variables have a strong influence on the x rotation
response. ANOVA plot 2 (Figure 8) shows only a few variables influence the z reaction force.

Plot 1 Plot 2

Figure 8: ANOVA Plot 1 and 2

There was no single variable that was irrelevant to the “toggling” response and therefore all 5 variables
remained.

It was decided to use the HyperOpt solver to continue from the best DOE solution using the Optimisation based
on DOE feature in Hyperstudy, i.e. revert back to hill-climbing but starting from the DoE best condition with the
intention that a local/global optimum existed and therefore converged upon without encountering large
discontinuities in the response surface as seen previously. The results were this time far more impressive with
an optimum solution found with 21 iterations (Figure 9). The solution satisfied the imposed constraints and was
able to give a reduction in mass over the current design. The non-linear nature of this problem meant that this
solution may only be a local minimum and within the design space there may be a lower mass global minimum
solution, however, the essence of the problem was to achieve the constraints and by using the HyperWorks
suite that could be done. The work did not extend into this field as the customer was very happy with the
solution and used the final bar routing to define clearances to the remaining structure, timescales were such that
further fine-tuning was not possible or requested.

Figure 9: Responses from HyperStudy Exact Optimisation Based on DOE Results

3.0 Non Linear Optimisation for Product Crash Performance

3.1 Introduction

An investigation was carried out by TKA to determine if a crash simulation controlled by HyperStudy could tune
a component to an exact performance target. The driver for this project was to replace an expensive bush which
pulls out under a specific load (to achieve vehicle level crash strategy), with a simple collar giving a very
significant cost saving opportunity.

© Altair Engineering 2007 Delivering World Class Chassis Design 14-5

3.2 Model Set-up

The Altair Radioss crash solver was used to perform the non-linear analysis. The first step in the analysis was
to simulate the M12 grade 10 bolt to clamp the joint with the specified 126Nm torque. A load of 52kN was
applied to the joint over the first 4ms to represent the clamping stage. A defined velocity of 48kph was applied
at the bottom of the tower (60° downwards in ‘z’ and 30° rearwards in ‘x’) for an additional 5ms. The section
force through the tower was monitored as the output and a smoothing filter used to clean the output signal
(Figure 10). The smoothed force level was seen to be higher than the target level, therefore an optimisation
study was initiated to determine the most important design variables.

Figure 10: Baseline Response with no Split in the Collar

3.3 Design Variables

The design variables chosen for investigation were as follows:

1. Axial length of tower attachment

2. Outer Diameter of the collar
3. Wall thickness of collar
4. Slot open angle (effectively slot width)

Figure 11: Design variables

© Altair Engineering 2007 Delivering World Class Chassis Design 14-6

DoE was chosen as the required approach rather than hill-climbing as it was felt that the discontinuities in the
response surface would make it very difficult for a hill-climbing algorithm to converge to a sensible solution.

3.3 DOE Results

250 runs were carried out with a Hammersley model and the results fitted to both a 2nd and 3rd order least-
squares response surface using HyperStudy. The ANOVA results are given below and clearly show the two
main parameters are wall thickness and slot width. This seems sensible as the wall thickness very strongly
influences bending strength which is the mode of opening of the collar.

60

50

40

30

20

10

0
Axial_length*OD

Axial_length*Wall_thickness
Axial_length

Axial_length*Slot_angle
OD

Wall_thickness

OD*Wall_thickness
Slot_angle

OD*Slot_angle

Wall_thickness*Slot_angle
length

Interactions

Interactions

Interactions

Interactions

Interactions
thickness

angle

Interactions
OD

Slot
Axial

Wall

Figure 12: ANOVA ~ main effects

A residuals plot (between DoE surface prediction and result) is shown in Figure 13. The residual plot shows
reasonable correlation for such a non-linear problem (R^2=0,91) with better correlation for the response surface
at the lower end of the force levels (the area of interest). The correlation at the higher force levels is less good,
with the response surface fit tending to under predict the actual result.

35

30

25
Predicted (kN)

20

15

10

0
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35

Observed (kN)

Figure 13: Residuals Plot

© Altair Engineering 2007 Delivering World Class Chassis Design 14-7
3.6 Further Activity.

Once the response surfaces were known for each output metric, it was possible to use Excel to predict a
solution that would achieve the required force level and also calculate the pre-compression from pre-assembly
so that solutions that meet the crash requirement do not contravene the requirement for the joint to not slip in
service.

This simple Excel chart (Figure 14) then allows quick what-if scenarios to be run as well as tolerance studies to
be performed either by TKA or the customer (however only tolerance studies relating to the chosen design
variables!).

Figure 14: Excel Chart Incorporating the Response Surface Equations

4.0 Non-Linear Optimisation in Strength Limited Design

4.1 Design Task

There is a strong incentive to use single shell pressings for Lower Control Arms (LCA’s) in vehicles due to mass
savings, process savings and, often, durability improvements. The main design driver for these parts is their
collapse load, which has minimum and occasionally maximum values as targets. The minimum targets are
obvious (high loads generated during pothole braking, for example) but the maximum targets are sometimes
relevant to protect other elements in the chassis structure that may be weaker than a very strong arm.

Figure 15: Typical Lower Control Arm (LCA) position and Configuration in a Mac-Pherson Strut Vehicle
© Altair Engineering 2007 Delivering World Class Chassis Design 14-8
4.2 Optimisation Stage 1 - Linear analysis using OptiStruct

An initial model linking all of the hardpoints and using the available package space was designed using a single
piece of steel with no conventional closer included. A closer is used to generate a closed, usually rectangular
section to provide additional strength see Figure 15. The part was modelled in ABAQUS and with non-linear
bushes and was found to buckle at 23% of target using a typical high strength steel grade. Figure 16 shows the
part simply twisting before any substantial load can be resisted. The addition of a full closer to this design
increases the buckling above 100% but at the cost of double the material required and now additional
processing to weld the parts together.

Figure 16: Single Shell LCA Buckling for Design no Optimisation Included

A linear model of the control arm was then generated and the stiffness measured at the balljoint. Topography
optimisation using OptiStruct was used to improve the stiffness of the part in the buckling direction and to
reduce the rotation of the balljoint under loading. The improved stiffness design was able to increase the
buckling load to 47% of target.

Figure 17: Single Shell Topography Optimisation to Improve Stiffness and Rotation Response

Manual design changes inside HyperMesh were incorporated to bring the buckling value up to 63%. The
changes were based on visualising the buckled shape and trying to remove the instability by adding more
section until the local buckling was prevented at that area. Without using non-linear optimisation it was
impossible to achieve more than this using geometrical changes only.

Figure 18: Single Shell LCA Buckling after Topography Results have been Included in Design

4.2 Optimisation Stage 2 - Non-linear analysis using HyperStudy and ABAQUS

The design was then parameterised and 37 shape variables produced to give a large range of variation to the
design. Each shape was limited in size so that it would remain inside the package volume available for this
component.

A Hammersly DOE study was set-up with 450 runs (equivalent to 1 weekend of run time). The number of runs
was not able to determine the response surface for the number of variables used but was able to identify the
dominant variables which could then be carried forward to optimise the design, as used by Joanne R. Zuzelski
[1].
© Altair Engineering 2007 Delivering World Class Chassis Design 14-9
 Figure 19: Single Shell LCA Hypermorph Domains and Handles, along with ANOVA Plot Showing
Dominant Shape Variables.

The ANOVA plot above was used to identify the 9 most influential design parameters. The best model found
from the random scatter of 450 runs had a buckle value of 88% and showed the effectiveness of running a high
number of jobs to find a maximum for a non-linear problem.

Two approaches were then taken, the first to run another set of 200 runs with the 9 most influential variables
and second to use the HyperOpt hill-climbing optimiser with the 9 variables and the 88% starting location.

Figure 20: Single Shell LCA Final non-linear Ooptimised Buckling.

The second DOE run did not produce an improvement in results but was able to far more accurately generate a
response surface for the study.

However, as seen above for the ARB toggling, the HyperOpt algorithm was able to fine tune the local maxima to
find a buckling value of 98% target. The buckling response seen in Figure 20 shows far less twist than before,
along with buckling being initialled in several areas of the control arm at the same time (indicative of a fine-tuned
design). This was an excellent result and demonstrated the criticality of the use of non-linear optimisation to
achieve the buckling target without resorting to on-cost options such as up-gauging and/or weld-on patches.
Further work incorporating the use of the press-forming effects [2] improved the buckling strength to be above
target allowing further weight and cost-saving opportunities to be realised.

5.0 Conclusions
These examples indicate that the use of structural optimisation can be used to tackle non-linear problems with,
in some cases, very sharp changes in responses typical of buckling / instability type problems. This significantly
extends the use of structural optimisation within TKA beyond that typically attempted (e.g. simple linear topology
/ topography / size / shape) into the non-linear domain. Key to this is the use of HyperStudy to wrap around the
external codes (ABAQUS, Dyna, RADIOSS) with the powerful post-processing capabilities of HyperView that
can be automated using TCL scripts.

6.0 References
[1] 'Achieving the Optimal Bottle Design by Virtual Simulation Techniques', J R Zuzelski,
www.idspackaging.com

[2] 'Simulated Behaviour of Sheet Metal Chassis Parts Taking into Account the Effect of
Forming', G Lavinal, C Laloye, L Taupin, F El-Khaldi, C Lienard, EUROPAM ‘2002.
© Altair Engineering 2007 Delivering World Class Chassis Design 14-10