50 % weight reduction with composite part for automotive rear seat back
The AZL Team has worked on a product cost benchmark for a rear seat back component to investigate cost and weight savings by switching from a steel to a composite based part.
The calculations have been done in the framework of the AZL Workgroup Product Cost Benchmark. Within this workgroup the AZL Network has the possibility to closely work together with the team and also suggest components, which will jointly be analyzed. This is a service that is included in the AZL Partnership. The workgroup is supported by our growing engineering team that prepares mechanical analyses to benchmark the different component aspects against each other.
One of the last analyzed business cases was the automotive rear seat back.
Automotive rear seat back
The simplified model represents steel sheets that are welded together and show plastic behavior. A frontal impact is demonstrated, evaluated via explicit simulation. The model simulates an 18 kg wood block representing luggage that crashes with 50 km/h into the rear seat bench.
The deformations and acting forces are used to develop components made of plastics or hybrid material combinations that exhibit the same performance with lower mass. Through a suitable combination of production processes, which are analyzed by AZL Aachen GmbH in cooperation with Conbility GmbH, it is possible to reduce the weight compared to the steel component to more than 50 %. First cost calculations have shown potential to reduce cost of around 10%. More detailed calculations will be done until the next workgroup meeting.