An Integrated Approach Supporting Design, Simulation, and Production Engineering of Connection Techniques in Automotive Body-in-white Development

Abstract

Due to their 3D nature, many CAD B-Spline surfaces are difficult to design and edit with traditional 2D interfaces, e.g., a 2D mouse. Based on an energy minimization method or variational B-Spline technique, the paper presents the technique of using a haptic device to design B-Spline surfaces. Under complex constraints and without any pre-calculation, the variational B-Spline technique used in the system can solve virtually all practical B-Spline surfaces in a matter of milliseconds. Such results are much more efficient and powerful than previous work in the variational B-Spline field. By using a haptic interface, the system allows a user in a natural 3D environment to directly manipulate/design constraints, e.g., points and curves, and in real time, the system generates energy-minimization B-Spline surfaces in response to haptic operations. The discussed technique delivers all the performance and capacity required for using haptics to design high-quality B-Spline surfaces, and haptic-based surface operations provide a powerful method for designing B-Spline surfaces.

Optimized Data Exchange Process between Design and Production Engineering

“…As prior stated, the development of automotive bodies (BIW), including but not limited to the topics body architectures, crash-, strengths-and durability, materials and joining technologies, has changed over the last decades [6,8]. The change in this field is mainly driven by the issues of vehicle safety, weight management and cost reduction.…”