Aplicação da otimização topológica em um protetor de cárter

Abstract

The skid plate is a vehicle component located at the bottom, responsible for protecting the systems in that region. Due to its exposure to impacts from the road, it must be resistant and, for this reason, becomes heavy. Thus, there is an opportunity to use structural optimization tools to reduce the mass of this component. This study aims to utilize the topology optimization tool of the Tosca Structure software to reduce the mass of a Renault’s vehicle skid plate while meeting the performance conditions required by the company for product approval through a virtual finite element analysis. To achieve this, structural optimization concepts such as objective function, constraints, and design variables are explored, along with fundamental concepts related to optimization algorithms. Additionally, the study addresses the necessary parameters for performing optimization with this software and defines optimizations with different parameters, resulting in four optimization proposals. Among them, two maintain performance above the company’s required threshold and achieve a mass reduction of 17.2% and 15.3%. With these two proposals, the study successfully meets its objective of presenting a new, lighter, and optimized skid plate geometry.