Conceptual Development and Design of Components for an Approvable Research Vehicle

Abstract

In recent years it can be noticed that the automotive industries are coming up with various innovative technologies and ideas such as electrification, self-driving, ADAS, vehicle structural enhancements, lightweight structures and 3D printing to improve the overall performance and efficiency of a vehicle. When we look into electrification, alternative vehicle drives have been in increasing demand for several years. The global market of electric vehicles is increasing year by year as these vehicles are offering key features. Taking into consideration the advantages offered by lightweight structures of vehicles, companies are diving into various design procedures, manufacturing techniques and lightweight materials to develop lightweight vehicles. The automotive industries are making vehicle structural enhancements to improve passenger safety. As part of the Next Generation Car (NGC) project, the German Aerospace Center (DLR), at the ‘Institute of Vehicle Concepts’ has come up with three different vehicle concepts with innovative structural designs contributing towards sustainable and cost-effective, user-oriented, secure and networked mobility concept. Safe Light Regional Vehicle (SLRV) is one of the vehicle concepts of DLR. The innovative design of SLRV addresses the concerns of safety, emissions, development costs and weight. The prototype of the SLRV was developed with a single piece of canopy which serves as a bonnet, windscreen and roof of the car. There were a few issues in the initial prototype of the canopy and in the previous master thesis work these issues were addressed with possible solutions. However, those solutions were leading to the design and manufacturing complexity and it has been decided not to make any changes in canopy design, instead, the team has come up with a new concept for SLRV, which is an open-top car concept. This master thesis aims at developing concepts for the new components of the open-top SLRV so that the car shall be road-legal with those parts. The concepts are developed by implementing the product development process in order to obtain final manufacturable and permissible components. In an overview, the work is summarized by giving an outlook of all the objectives achieved in this work which contributes to making road-legal SLR.