Electric vehicles body frame structure design method: An approach to design electric vehicle body structure based on battery arrangement

Although the electric vehicles (EVs) have become the main development of the automotive industry, there is still very limited knowledge about the design method of EVs’ body structure. This paper substantially increases this limited knowledge by developing an EV’s aluminum alloy body frame structure design (EVFD) method based on battery arrangements. The main concept of the EVFD approach is the development of the parametric knowledge base to facilitate performance driven design of body structure in concept design stage, including the battery sub-libraries designed by vehicle power performances and the modular body frame structure sub-libraries and cross section of profile sub-libraries designed by structure performances. The layout of vehicle is firstly determined based on battery volume which calculated on the basis of power performance of EVs. And then, the body frame structures are designed by multi-load topology optimization and multi-objective parametric optimization based on the body structure performance, considering the battery layout and its mass distribution. The developed body structure knowledge base is screened through comparing their structural mechanical properties. The feasibility and accuracy of selected EV’s aluminum alloy body frame structure is verified by experiment. In this paper, the case study demonstrates that the proposed EVFD method based on battery arrangement can be effectively used to design aluminum alloy body frame structure of EVs, which provides a reference to other EV’s body structure design. Due to the performance driven design concept employed, the designed body structure for EV meets the requirements of lightweight, dynamic performance, and structural mechanical properties.