No abstract

Recently, with the increase in awareness about a clean environment worldwide, fuel efficiency standards are being strengthened in accordance with exhaust gas regulations. In the automotive industry, various studies are ongoing on vehicle body weight reduction to improve fuel efficiency. This study aims to reduce vehicle weight by replacing the existing steel reinforcements in an automobile center pillar with a composite reinforcement. Composite materials are suitable for weight reduction because of their higher specific strength and stiffness compared to existing steel materials; however, one of the disadvantages is their high material cost. Therefore, a hybrid molding method that simultaneously performs compression and injection was proposed to reduce both process time and production cost. To replace existing steel reinforcements with composite materials, various reinforcement shapes were designed using a carbon fiber-reinforced plastic patch and glass fiber-reinforced plastic ribs. Structural analyses confirmed that, using these composite reinforcements, the same or a higher specific stiffness was achieved compared to the that of an existing center pillar using steel reinforcements. The composite reinforcements resulted in a 67.37% weight reduction compared to the steel reinforcements. In addition, a hybrid mold was designed and manufactured to implement the hybrid process.

Absolute nodal-coordinate formulation is a technique that was developed in 1996 for expressing the large rotation and deformation of a flexible body. It utilizes global slopes without a finite rotation in order to define nodal coordinates. The method has a shortcoming in that the central processing unit time increases because of increases in the degrees of freedom. In particular, when considering the deformation of a cross section, the shortcoming due to the increase in the degrees of freedom becomes clear. Therefore, in the present research, the dimensional equation of motion concerning a two-dimensional shear deformable beam, developed by Omar and Shabana, is converted into a nondimensional equation of motion in order to reduce the central processing unit time. By utilizing an example of a cantilever beam, wherein an exact solution for the static deflection exists, the nondimensional equation of motion was verified. Moreover, by using an example of a free-falling flexible pendulum, the efficiency of the nondimensional equation of motion gained by increasing the number of elements was compared with that of the dimensional equation of motion.