Abstract
The automobile suspension system is composed of parts that affect performances of a vehicle such as ride quality, handling characteristics, straight performance and steering effort, etc. Moreover, by using the finite element analysis the cost for the initial design step can be decreased. In the design of a suspension system, usually system vibration and structural rigidity must be considered simultaneously to satisfy dynamic and static requirements simultaneously. In this paper, we consider the weight reduction and the increase of the first eigen-frequency of a suspension part, the upper control arm, especially using topology optimization and size optimization. Firstly, we obtain the initial design to maximize the first eigen-frequency using topology optimization. Then, we apply the multi-objective parameter optimization method to satisfy both the weight reduction and the increase of the first eigen-frequency. The design variables are varying during the optimization process for the multi-objective. Therefore, we can obtain the deterministic values of the design variables not only to satisfy the terms of variation limits but also to optimize the two design objectives at the same time. Finally, we have executed reliability based optimal design on the upper control arm using the Monte-Carlo method with importance sampling method for the optimal design result with 98％ reliability.
