Effect of structural adhesives in noise, vibration and harshness (NVH) characteristics of vehicle body design

Abstract

Application of structural adhesives has received an increased interest in automotive industry due to their attractive characteristics as an alternative to other lightweight strategies. There are various modeling methods for structural adhesives validated against experimental data on subsystem level on simpler structures such as single, double and T-type joints. However, their effect on the vehicle level has not been addressed yet. The objective of this paper is to fill this gap and is to investigate the effect of structural adhesives on the key performance indices of an automotive body. For this purpose, full application of structural adhesives is included in the finite element model of 2010 Toyota Yaris, and the results are compared with base model without any structural adhesives on torsional stiffness, bending stiffness and global modes of the vehicle body. The results show that the application of structural adhesives resulted in highest improvement on torsional stiffness with 26.9 %, while the global torsion mode is improved by 12.2 %. The simulation results indicate that the full application of structural adhesives does have lesser effect on bending stiffness and 1 st global vertical bending mode with only 6.9 % and 4.5 %, respectively. A topology optimization study is performed using Solid Isotropic Material with Penalization (SIMP) method and two optimization packages corresponding to 40% and 60% of full adhesives are compared on the aforementioned key performance indices of the vehicle body.