Potential impact of additive manufacturing and topology optimization inspired lightweight design on vehicle track performance

This paper describes an interactive approach for analyzing the impact of the enhanced design freedom in additive manufacturing (AM) combined with topology optimization. The main goal is to identify weight saving potentials on a holistic vehicle level and evaluate the influence on vehicle performance by means of lap time savings. Therefore lightweight use cases enabled by AM are gathered in a database. Projecting the weight reduction rates of this database to a sports car as reference vehicle by means of a weight list, CAD data and a part relation analysis leads to an overall weight saving potential. This analysis shows significant weight saving potentials for each technical section of an already lightweight design focused sports car, namely the Bugatti Chiron. The improvement in track performance considering the weight savings is put into perspective by means of lap time simulation on the Nürburgring Nordschleife and corroborate the identified weight saving potentials.