Design of lightweight magnesium car body structure under crash and vibration constraints

Applications – Car body – Crash Management Systems

Reducing whole-body vibration and musculoskeletal injury with a new car seat design.

A new car seat design, which allows the back part of the seat (BPS) to lower down while a protruded cushion supports the lumbar spine, was quantitatively tested to determine its effectiveness and potentials in reducing whole-body vibration (WBV) and musculoskeletal disorders in automobile drivers. Nine subjects were tested to drive with the seat in: 1) the conventional seating arrangement (Norm...

Vibration Damping of a Flexible Car Body Structure Using Piezo-Stack Actuators

In this work piezo-stack actuators mounted in consoles are utilized to actively dampen vibrations of a flexible car body structure by introducing bending moments. Using an example of a heavy metro vehicle the complete design for the active vibration damping system is presented. Both analytical modeling and a system identification of the vehicle are described, issues of modal representation and ...

Car crash tragedy

A tragic car crash has killed two distinguished British researchers. Dame Anne McLaren and Professor Donald Michie died when their car came off the motorway between Cambridge and London last month. Anne McLaren was a leading geneticist who became the first female official of the Royal Society and Michie was a researcher in artificial intelligence who worked as part of the British codebreaking g...

Rule-based Lightweight Structure Design

This paper presents a rule-based computer aided design framework for assembling complex internal structure. It defines each voxel with its neighborhood as an intelligent agent, which make it possible to convert the structural assembly problem into an optimization problem of a multi-agent system. We use this method in the lightweight model design. Simple defeasible rules are used to build up the...