Senior advanced engineering leader - virtual optimization, Volvo Car Corporation
Alexander Govik received his Ph.D. degree in solid mechanics at Linköping University in 2014. Today he works as a specialist at Volvo Car Corporation, at the body and closures department. He is responsible for developing optimization methods and to support with design optimizations in the early phases of car development projects.
Speeches
Optimizations are regularly used for finding the best parameter settings of a system, but more importantly optimization methods can be utilized in order to gain knowledge about a system. In a complex and ever changing surrounding it is difficult to account for all requirements, constraints and load cases in an optimization. Therefore, a good understanding of the relationship between design variables and system responses are fundamental in order to quickly adapt to changes. In this way, optimization methods play a major role in the work to shorten development time.
In this presentation, the closing functionality of a trunk lid system is studied. Two main customer demands on the trunk lid closing functionality are that it should be easy to close and that it should not damage the car even if it is slammed shut by full force. That is, the closing system should be soft enough to allow for low velocity closing but stiff enough to prevent the trunk lid from hitting the car body at high velocity closing. These two contradicting demands together with design requirements on narrow split lines between the trunk lid and the car body can be challenging to fulfil. For these kind of problems, multi-objective optimization is an effective tool for finding which design variables that affect which attributes and for finding a balanced system fulfilling the requirements. Furthermore, by considering the influence of variation, the robustness of the closing functionality can be checked.