Refined modelling of thin-walled beam, plate and joint for automobile frame

At the conceptual design stage, the simplified frame is extensively applied in the body-in-white (BIW) structure to rapidly calculate its performances. However, it is difficult to acquire an accurate simplified frame of the BIW structure for the calculation of the bending stiffness, torsional stiffness and frequencies. Therefore, this paper proposes a simplified modeling method by using the thin-walled beams (TWBs) with complex sections, semi-rigid elements and cross beam structures. Compared with the traditional modelling method, the TWBs contain more types of the complex sections, the semi-rigid elements are used to describe various deformations, and the plate structure is replaced by using the cross beam structure to improve the accuracy of the simplified frame. An engineering example demonstrates that the simplified frame can accelerate the conceptual design of the BIW structure.