SPOT WELDS VS BODY PERFORMANCE

Cuauhtemoc Quiroz Garfias

Ford Motor Company/ Body Exterior CAE

Luis Chavela Guerra

Ford Motor Company/ Body Exterior CAE
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 Introduction
At an advanced stage of the development process where the vehicle was mature and already
met the required performance, the manufacturing team informed that the capacity of specific
welding stations was exceeded in one of the plants where the vehicle was going to be
manufactured. Leading to decide between investing to increase the plant capacity or reducing
the amount of welds in the design to fit current capacity. The first option implied a cost that must
be justified and in the second there was a risk of impacting the performance.

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 Problem
Base design: Situation:
• Meets performance (Safety, NVH, • Global product.
Stiffness, Durability, etc.).
• Already defined manufacturing plants
• Feasible to cover all desired regions/markets.
(Stamping/Assembly/Cost).
• Capacity of welding stations in only
• Tooling frozen. one plant was exceeded by ~20 spot
welds.

Sacrifice performance or invest in plant capacity?

Which welds should be removed and which metrics would be affected?

Data driven decision required.

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 Approach – Design space (variables)
Since the original design included several thousands of welds and the response time was short,
the design space had to be bounded. Considering the affected weld stations, welds/parts
commonality and subassembly welds, the subspace to study was about 600 spot welds, each
considered as a discrete and binary variable, presence or absence.

• 1 weld = 1 binary variable

Presence (Young modulus = 2.1e5)

Absence (Young modulus = 1)

• 2^485 combinations
Complete design space Subspace 485 welds
~4500 welds

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 Approach – Metrics defining the performance

Attributes: Performance: Metrics:

• Safety • Body torsional modes • Torsion
• Vehicle Dynamics • Body stiffness • Diagonal Distortion
• Vehicle NVH • Sheet metal fatigue (pending)
• Closures • Spot weld fatigue (pending)
• Chassis
• Powertrain
• Durability
• …
• …

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 Multiobjective Multivariable Optimization problem

• Minimize the amount of welds (sum of Young

modulus of all the variables)
• Maximize torsion (the higher, the better) subject to
1% detriment.
• Minimize diagonal distortion (the lower, the better)
subject to 1% detriment.

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 Process
Interactive design space
selection: Design Optimization
- TCL/TK in Altair Hypermesh setup:
- MSC NASTRAN sol200 Analysis of Optimization
- Siemens HEEDS results
- Siemens HEEDS Model build for
- Microsoft Excel confirmation run
Variables
- TCL/TK in Altair
Hypermesh

Objectives and Constraints

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 Results – Diagonal Distortion VS No. Spot Welds
Without symmetry condition.

1.9

1.8
LGO DIAGONAL DISTORTION [NORMALIZED]

1.7

1.6

1.5

1.4

1.3

1.2

1.1

0.9
200 250 300 350 400 450 500
NUMBER OF SPOT WELDS

SPOT WELDS VS LGO DD BASELINE LGO DD +1.0% BASELINE ID 436

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 Results – Torsion Stiffness VS No. Spot Welds
Without symmetry condition.

1
BIP TORSIONAL STIFFNESS [NORMALIZED]

0.95

0.9

0.85

0.8
200 250 300 350 400 450 500

NUMBER OF SPOT WELDS

SPOT-WELDS VS KTORS BASLINE ID 436

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 Results – Diagonal Distortion VS No. Spot Welds
Including symmetry condition.
1.9

1.8
LGO DIAGONAL DISTORTION [NORMALIZED]

1.7

1.6

1.5

1.4

1.3

1.2

1.1

0.9
200 250 300 350 400 450 500
NUMBER OF SPOT WELDS (CONSIDERING SIMMETRY)
LGO SPOT-WELDS VS LGO DD BASELINE LGO DD +1.0% BASELINE ID 459

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 Results – Torsion Stiffness VS No. Spot Welds
Including symmetry condition.

1
BIP TORSIONAL STIFFNESS [NORMALIZED]

0.95

0.9

0.85

0.8
200 250 300 350 400 450 500
NUMBER OF SPOT WELDS (CONSIDERING SIMMETRY)
LGO SPOT-WELDS VS KTORS BASELINE ID 459

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 Results – Symmetry/No-Symmetry comparison
Baseline design space Spot Welds to remove Resultant design
No Symmetry

SW=485(100%) SW=81(17%) SW=404(83%)

Tor=99.8%
DD=100.4%
Symmetry

SW=485(100%) SW=127(26%) SW=358(74%)

Tor=99.4%
DD=100.9%

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 Conclusions
• Automation and optimization tools enabled the team to have a
quick response time.
• Symmetry provided better solutions with same amount of iterations.
• After 600 iterations, the result was that 26% of spots could be
eliminated with a marginal detriment of 0.6% and 0.9% in torsion
stiffness and diagonal distortion at liftgate opening respectively.
• This study provided enough data to supported the decision to not
to invest in increasing the capacity while staying within acceptable
level of performance.
• Sheet metal and spot weld fatigue cases need to be included in
the process to cover all the affected attributes and avoid separate
verification.

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 Thank You!
Cuauhtémoc Quiroz Garfias
Body Exterior CAE Engineer, Ford Motor Company
cquiroz5@ford.com
Luis Chavela Guerra
Body Exterior CAE Engineer, Ford Motor Company
lchavela@ford.com

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