Evaluation Of Material Lightweight Design In ICE Vehicles Based On Performance Indices

The improvement of the fuel economy is one of the main challenges the car industry has to face today.The vehicle manufacturers are following different approaches to decrease the fuel consumption,where the vehicle weight reduction has been considered as one of the most important ones.It is assumed that 0.3l/100 km fuel can be saved by a weight reduction of 100 kg.With up to 35% of a vehicle's weight,the car body has the biggest weight share.However growing of demands on modern vehicle led to an increase of the average weight of a car in the last decades.To encounter this progress,the use of lightweight design is gaining more and more importance.The success of lightweight approaches is significantly depending on the correct choice of the material.However the search for suitable candidates for particular applications can very quickly become difficult due to the big variety of materials.Therefore a systematic selection of materials for lightweight construction is necessary.This thesis attempts to give an overview on lightweight design,starting with a briefly introduction of the automobile industry.Then different performance indices such as material or lightweight quality indices which can be used in the progress of material selection are explained and discussed.The most important lightweight materials in the automobile industry are presented and some forecast are given.In addition their manufacturing processes are introduced.In the last step different study cases are analyzed and evaluated with the presented performance indices and discussed regarding their lightweight advantages and potential.