Design and Material Characterization of Reinforced Plastics for Secondary Structural Load Paths in an Early Development Phase

This paper presents different modeling approaches and technical challenges for the discretization of anisotropic elastic-viscoplastic materials in secondary structural parts for the automotive sector. In terms of accuracy, complex geometries based on reinforced plastics in secondary load paths need to factor in the manufacturing process and the resultant local anisotropies within correspondent CAE models. However, during the early phase of product development, integrating reinforced plastics, a robust numerical basis throughout the concept evaluation is required. The basic idea is to maintain the correspondent level of complexity through the subcomponent design within certain limits, in order to improve, speed up and adequately handle complexity in CAE concepts for the automotive sector. Finally, a benchmark analysis of possible options and modeling techniques is introduced, as a contribution to evaluate the balance between the dimensioning of structural load paths and the required material characterization within an acceptable effort.