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Because of their high specific stiffness and strength, composite materials have been used in the structural of vehicles to provide a competitive advantage of through weight reduction while maintaining or even increasing functionality. Composite materials have been used for IP carrier which forms the skeleton of the cockpit and provides the base architecture off of which IP components are attached and function. Specially, composite materials using injection molding process have been used to develop IP carrier recently, due to high level of styling flexibility by that can achieve high degree integration and simplicity of process. However, for injection part especially for large part would deform largely. Consequently, deformation controlling is very important for large composite part that used injection molding. In this study mold flow analysis was conducted on the composite IP carrier structure which gets from the topology optimization result.

Now weight reduction is increasingly needed in automotive industry to improve fuel efficiency and to reduce emission. Various lightweight technologies have been used to vehicles. Because of its heavy weight and complex shape, IP carrier tends to be integration and weight intensive. Therefore lightweight is necessary for IP carrier. This paper lists the fourth lightweight technologies used for IP carrier by now, which are Magnesium alloy part, Aluminum alloy part, Hybrid composite part, Composite material injection part. For magnesium alloy part and aluminum alloy part, they have been mass produced for some years. The hybrid composite part has been researched for some years. Recently, the injection composite part has been researched and some parts have been developed and tested. By outlining the design, manufacturing, weight reduction and cost of these lightweight technologies, this paper fully analyzed these used technologies.