L&L Products

OPTIMIZATION OF  STRUCTURAL
COMPONENTS AND SHORTENED DESIGN CYCLE

About the Customer

For more than 60 years, L&L Products have been providing unique solutions to the
automotive industry. They offer a custom engineering service in the domains of static sealing, acoustics, vibration reduction, structural reinforcements, and composite components for automotive, aerospace, commercial vehicle, and other industrial applications.

A growing part their product offering is “Composite Body Solutions” (CBS™) which has great applications in the automotive industry to help reduce structural weight and noise, while maintaining or improving both local and global structural stiffness, durability, and crash worthiness.

Their Challenge

L&L Products CBS™ structural reinforcement technology comprises of a foaming structural adhesive on a highly-engineered thermoset or thermoplastic carrier. Commonly used to enhance overall body-in-white (BIW) stiffness, other benefits include load path management, section integrity, light-weighting, increased durability, while having no impact in body shop practices. CBS™ goal is to deliver an efficient solution for both current and future applications needing lightweight, strong structural parts, like electric vehicles (EV) battery protection. 

Their traditional workflow was a three-step process that involves extracting the surfaces from the initial CAE model to build an offset envelope of the surfaces and then creating a high-fidelity
tetra mesh of the candidate design space. It relies on both CAE and Design/CAD resources,
takes up to an hour, and often needs to be repeated multiple times depending on how many
CBS™ inserts are intended for a vehicle.

Their goals were clear: to reduce CAE model build time with a CAE-driven process in which the
models were built exclusively by the CAE engineer, thus shortening their time to market by removing the reliance on other teams.

L&L Products also needed to attain optimization results faster to enable different variants to be explored to achieve a truly optimal solution. All of which accelerates the overall CBS™ development process.

Our Solution

Altair® HyperWorks® offers a best-in-class environment that includes, but is not solely focused on topology optimization to identify the best material position to give an optimized mass/performance. The model build and setup allows users to run and analyze models using the Altair® OptiStruct® topology optimization solvers. By using voxel elements, the process is streamlined into an single-step workflow delivering significant time savings. Of equal importance, there is no loss of accuracy in the results and computational expense is not negatively affected.

Results

The traditional workflow took about 1 hour per area and the expertise of CAD and CAE
engineers to accomplish the three-steps (CAE model extraction, build offset envelope in CAD,
tetramesh CAD) before running the model. Whereas, the new approach took 5 minutes per area
and effectively replaced the old three-steps with a single, local voxel mesh step without need
for CAD user involvement. Comparing results between the old and new workflows for a
CBS™ part, the BIW torsion mode is effectively the same; +3.0 Hz (old) and +3.1 Hz (new).