Structural Design Vs Manufacturability Costs of Complex Stamped Components

Abstract This paper presents a study of tradeoffs between design and manufacturing cost objectives for complex sheet metal stamped components, taking into account both topological (shape) and size variants of geometric features. The study artifact is the support frame of automotive hoods for a given outer skin. Traditional optimization methods, such as Design of Experiments (DOE)/Response Surface Optimization (RSO), mathematical algorithms, and Genetic Algorithms (GA), are not suitable because different feature shapes cannot be described by a given set of uniform design variables. A large data set of shape and size variants for automotive hood frames was curated for the study. Work has already been completed on generating geometric data sets and evaluating their structural design objectives. In this paper, we focus on manufacturing cost as a metric for manufacturability. We look at both the material and process costs, the latter determined indirectly via press loads for trimming and drawing operations, to find the press loads associated with manufacturing processes used to produce the hood designs already available in the 10k hood dataset. A 10% sampling was used in the stamping simulation from which response surfaces were created to use in completing manufacturability responses on (almost) all 10,000 designs in the data set. The manufacturing costs data curated from this research can provide designers insights into manufacturing costs during the design phases.