This presentation was made at the NAFEMS Americas "Creating the Next Generation Vehicle" held on the 14th of November in Troy.

The automotive engineering community is now confronting the largest technology transformation since its inception. This includes the electrification of powertrains for more efficient consumption and cleaner emissions, the reinvention of the battery with fast wireless charging capabilities and finally the advent of a fully autonomous vehicle. Compounding to these technology changes, the automotive companies design verification process is moving away from a major reliance on physical testing to almost a full virtual simulation product verification process.

The automotive engineering community is now confronting the largest technology transformation since its inception. This includes the electrification of powertrains for more efficient consumption and cleaner emissions, the reinvention of the battery with fast wireless charging capabilities and finally the advent of a fully autonomous vehicle. Compounding to these technology changes, the automotive companies design verification process is moving away from a major reliance on physical testing to almost a full virtual simulation product verification process.

Resource Abstract

Lightweighting has been continuing the top priority in automotive industry for years. Die casting plays an important role in achieving the lightweighting goal, because it is the most economical manufacturing process for mass productions of light metal automotive parts. Die casting manufacturing process uses high pressure to inject molten metal such as Aluminium and Magnesium alloys into a reusable steel mould cavity under high velocity. The process contains many complicated physical phenomena such as multi-phase and multi-media under high pressure, high temperature and high speed, which cause the extreme complicated characteristics of die casting manufacturing process simulation. Because of its complexity die casting manufacturing process simulation has not widely been applied to the up-front engineering of automotive part design. In consequence, quite often, it causes manufacturing challenges and/or problems in the downstream. This presentation discusses the potential ways to improve part design for die casting manufacturing process in up-front automotive engineering via different levels of simplified analyses or simulation approaches.



• General design rules & tips (simple guidelines, wall thickness, draft angle, parting line, rib, orientation, … )

• Quantitative analytical approach, evaluation index, requirement engineering, (heat modules, various process capability, PQ2, intensification feeding, …)

• Simplified manufacturing process simulation (solidification analysis, overall flow analysis, structural analysis, … )

• Standard/template manufacturing process simulation for automotive part design

• Automotive part geometry optimization for die casting manufacturing process

• Full die casting manufacturing process simulation and expert system creation.



Because die casting manufacturing process is for mass production, a small improvement in the up-front engineering could not only achieve a big financial gain in the downstream of part manufacturing, but also lower the risk of delaying the whole program by minimizing the engineering changes of the part geometry during die casting process development.