 Mats Larsson
Saab Automobile
I started my education back I 1971 at the Royal Institute of
Technology in Stockholm. I received a M.Sc in mechanical
engineering in 1978. I continued as a Phd-student at Solid
mechanics and Strength of Materials at RIT for 3 years. An offer
was made by the Aeronautical Research Institute in Sweden so I quit
school, there I worked with damage tolerance assessment applied to
a current Swedish fighter aircraft to be implemented on a new
design. In 1983 another offer was made from Saab Cars, today Saab
Automobile in 1983. I moved from Stockholm to a town called
Trollhättan (50000 inhabitants) where the (most) Saab cars are
designed and produced. I started there with structural analysis for
all possible problems.
In 1985 we started with crashworthiness analysis, I worked with
this topic for 5 years and then I moved to manufacturing
Engineering, stamping department. There I started with stamping
simulation work in 1990. For some years it was much work done to
establish the working methods and so forth. The big change came
when all parts where drawn in CAD and then stamping simulation
became a standard tool in our development process.
From my start at Saab until 6-7 years ago I was also very involved
with computer hardware ad software, what type of computers and
capacity we needed for all type of finite element work made for the
car program development. Discussions on what workstations we
should use and a Cray J90 and two SGI Origin 2000 were installed
during my active time on these issues.
In the beginning of 2005 the Swedish government issued a new
research program called MERA, Manufacturing Engineering Research
Area. Two friends working at Volvo and myself made plans for a
Finite Element Stamping Simulation project, we got some funding. In
this project there are five working packages and one of them is
about stochastic analysis.
Going back a little in time some of us at Saab realised the need to
include natural variation in our processes and when we found out
that we some computer power to start with stochastic analysis with
FEM we made acquaintance with some software companies as well as
established some cooperation within GM this was a log time ago, my
memory fails me I would say it was around 2000 or so. Then some
activities where made I several fields and I started to think how
this should be applied to sheet metal stamping simulation. (I am
still thinking on some issues, we can certainly discuss this
further.)
We tried to install commercial software for stochastic analysis
package to our main production stamping simulation software. Due to
some problems with software/hardware this project never went into
production. Then I made an internal proposal on this item and
received some funding and together with IVF a Swedish Research
Institute for Production. My needs and ideas became
Mathlab-programs at IVF, these programs were userunfriendly.
With this development as input to the MERA-program we continued our
efforts to develop options that we need and today we have some nice
features and still learning, have ideas on further development.
Still our software is userunfriendly, it is a research base and our
aim is to be able to explain to software companies was we want and
what we feel is important. To be able to do this we feel that we
need to do this development work otherwise we are not able to
evaluate if we are on the right track. Our work has resulted
in one paper accepted for publication in the "Journal of Structural
and Multidisciplinary Optimization” and a presentation at the
International Deep Drawing Research Group meeting recently in
Hungary, 2007.
My formal background in mathematical statistics is not deep enough
to follow all detailed discussions. Though my understanding and
learning by doing has compensated that to some extent. I think I
have a decent understanding on how we must take uncertainty and
complexity into our (finite element) predictions and hopefully I
can contribute in this field with some advice and thoughts.
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