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New regulations such as CAFE are pushing OEMs to look for options to increase vehicle mileage. Increasing combustion efficiency, alternate fuels and weight reductions are front runners in this quest. Due to limited scope of improvement in first two options, weight reduction is considered as more feasible option. Composite materials have long been used in Aerospace-aviation industries for weight reduction. So, usage of composite materials is gaining popularity in automotive industry also. Composite manufacturing is still an expensive and time consuming procedure, so virtual prototyping is being used to evaluate design, very early in the product cycle, to reduce physical prototype testing. In this paper we have tried to demonstrate how designers can easily analyze automotive components using virtual prototyping. Starting from CAD, general workflow of composite structure modeling to optimization is discussed.

Thorough design exploration is essential for improving vehicle performance in various aspects such as aerodynamic drag. Shape optimization algorithms in combination with computational tools such as Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) play an important role in design exploration. The present work describes a Free-Form Deformation (FFD) approach implemented within a general purpose CFD code for parameterization and modification of the aerodynamic shape of real-life vehicle models. Various vehicle shape parameters are constructed and utilized to change the shape of a vehicle using a mesh morphing technique based on the FFD algorithm. Based on input and output parameters, a design of experiments (DOE) matrix is created. CFD simulations are run and a response surface is constructed to study the sensitivity of the output parameter (aerodynamic drag) to variations in each input parameter.