Minimum Weight Design of a Car Trunk Deck-Lid Subject to Overall Stiffness Constraints

Abstract

A design procedure for a car trunk deck-lid using an approximate optimization technique is presented. Selecting the deck-lid gages and deck-lid inner panel configuration as design variables and overall stiffnesses as constraints, a possible weight reduction of 20 percent is demonstrated, compared with the base production deck-lid design. Although other practical design constraints might not allow one to achieve this goal, the potential value of optimization techniques is clearly demonstrated by this study. It is concluded that it could be useful to develop and apply such a procedure to components such as hoods, deck-lids, doors, and fenders, which are isolatable as structural components.