Cost- and performance-driven conceptual design of durable vehicle engineering applications

Postdoc: Mathilda Karlsson Hagnell
Start: 2019

A successful vehicle design must couple functional performance with competitive cost. To enable efficient early conceptual design, methodologies and strategies that simultaneously predict and design towards functional performance and resulting lifecycle costs are needed. This project addresses this concept design need through exploring the relationship between functional performance and lifecycle costs with regards to production, maintenance and repair. The project will involve extending present state-of-the-art technical cost modelling to include lifecycle costs as a function of structural requirements. To that end, structural analyses and limiting calculations as well as statistics may become important parts of the project. One example case study addresses durable engineering applications where fatigue is the general functional driver. In fatigue-sensitive applications such as heavy trucks, fatigue-induced usage phase repair and maintenance costs can be considerable in comparison to initial production cost. This means that introducing a higher cost during initial production for a fatigue-countering design can be justified by a decreased lifecycle cost. The project will follow several material themes, including more mature metallic material systems as well as a range of alternative material systems such as different types of short-and continuous-fibre composite materials, foam and sandwich systems.