Research Progress
IUPUI professor's winning car design mimics human rib cage
发布时间: 2015-05-25 07:07  点击:1453

IUPUI professor Andres Tovar recently won an international automotive design competition by using advanced technology to mimic Mother Nature’s own blueprints. More specifically, he designed a groundbreaking automobile frame that’s based on the human rib cage.

 

Tovar, a 43-year-old Colombian native, is an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at IUPUI and director of the school’s Engineering Design Research Laboratory. His fields of interest include biologically inspired design organization—improving human-made products using solutions found in the natural world. He got wind of the competition in November 2014. It seemed like a good fit for him, though the scale of the project, and its tight timetable, posed a challenge.

“I’ve been working in [automotive] crashworthiness for over 10 years,” he said. “I thought it was a perfect opportunity for me, because it’s what I’ve been doing for a while. But this competition was about creating a full vehicle. It was a new challenge for me, going from component design to full-vehicle design. A very interesting challenge.”

Indeed. The parameters of the contest, which was staged by the Advanced Research Projects Agency—Energy, a federal-government organization, and the Chandler, Arizona-based car company Local Motors, were evident in its name: the Lightweighting Technologies Enabling Comprehensive Automotive Redesign (LITECAR) Challenge. Essentially, it was an effort to develop concepts for vehicles that weighed far less than conventional cars but still met U.S. automotive safety standards. As the winner, Tovar received the $60,000 grand prize.

He competed with about 250 teams from around the world. Tovar spent December 2014 thinking about what he wanted to do, then got to work.

He designed his hypothetical vehicle around a naturally aerodynamic shape—a raindrop. The internal structure, responsible for both the vehicle’s strength and light weight (about 20 percent less than a conventional vehicle of the same size), consists of a latticework of aluminum-alloy support struts modeled after the human rib cage, nestled under a polymer composite “skin.”

Referred to as WaterBone, the structure creates both stability and extreme crashworthiness. It’s similar to the tubular steel roll cages in racing cars, but employs state-of-the-art design algorithms, materials and manufacturing techniques.

Four IUPUI graduate students helped Tovar with everything from running computer crash simulations to developing design algorithms. To put it perhaps a bit too simply, those algorithms attacked the contest’s central problem—making a lighter car that could survive crashes—using the same solutions nature might employ.

“This is a bio-inspired design algorithm,” Tovar said.
One of the competition’s judges, Alex Fiechter, head of product development for Local Motors, said Tovar’s entry rethought basic tenets of automotive design while taking advantage of new technologies and materials to make big leaps in safety, lighter weight and fuel economy.

  “People have thought around the idea of an exoskeleton before, but the way he’s approaching the material that the skeleton is made of, and the way he’s configured it, is what really brought it all together,” Fiechter said.

Race cars have been built around steel-frame skeletons for years, and the technology has even been tried in street-legal vehicles. The problem is that putting together a conventional steel frame requires lots of welds and lots of time, which translates into expense.

Tovar’s design gets around this problem, at least in theory, by positing the use of large-scale additive manufacturing, known colloquially as 3-D manufacturing. Instead of milling, say, an engine component out of a piece of solid metal, an additive-manufacturing device builds up the piece by laying down layer after layer of material. Using this method, it can rapidly create a “real world” version of a component that exists only as a computer file.

 

Read more:http://www.ibj.com/articles/53297-iupui-professors-winning-car-design-mimics-human-rib-cage

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