• Composites Research
• /
• v.32 no.5
• /
• pp.243-248
• /
• 2019

As demand of light weight in the automotive industry has increased, the cowl cross member has been investigated using various methods to change the material. Conventionally, a cowl cross member has been made of steel and aluminum, but recently researchers tested multi-material such as aluminum and plastic. We studied a new model of the cowl cross member made of composite and non ferrous materials. For products with a high degree of freedom in design, generally, the method of topology optimization is advantageous and for the partial bracket part of the cowl cross member had a degree of freedom in the design, a topology optimization is appropriate. Considering the characteristics of the cowl cross members, we need research to minimize the weight while having the performance of noise, vibration and harshness(NVH). Taking the mounting status of the product into consideration, we used an assembly model to optimize the cowl cross member. But this method took too much time so we considered simple cowl cross member assemble conditions using the direct matrix input method(DMI) with the Craig-Bampton Nodal Method. This method is capable of considering the status of the assembly without assembling the model, which reduced the solving time and increased the accuracy comparison with a cowl cross member without DMI.

• Transactions of Materials Processing
• /
• v.18 no.7
• /
• pp.538-543
• /
• 2009

The cowl cross bar of an automobile is a frame component that is installed inside the cockpit module to provide a guide surface, to which functional components for electricity and air condition are attached. In the recent years, the geometries of cowl cross bars are getting more complex in order to meet the demands of a wide variety of embedded functional components and the reduced weight of frame parts with enhanced mechanical and noise/vibration characteristics. There for, welding processes between tubes with different diameters are widely conducted while the welded parts are experiencing various problems such as undermined appearance, low production efficiency and poor mechanical characteristics. Therefore, this paper seeks to develop an one-piece forming process which eliminate welding process for the cowl cross bar by applying the tube drawing process. However, it was predicted that a conventional tube drawing can not be applied directly to the current part since the area reduction ratio of the drawing process reaches 51.7% which exceeds the general limiting value. Therefore, in this study, a combined drawing process which adds a compressive force to a tensile force of the conventional drawing process was proposed and 2-stage drawing process was designed by using CAE analyses. In addition, drawing tryouts were carried out by using the manufactured combined drawing machine in order to verify the designed process.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Manufacturing Technology Engineers
• /
• v.23 no.5
• /
• pp.525-531
• /
• 2014

A cowl cross is a part of the car's instrument panel used to maintain the rigidity of the vehicle body side. The application of laser welding has the benefits of speed and thermal deformation compared to arc welding. An ultra-high strength steel sheet is used to reduce the weight of the vehicle body parts. Generally, formability of such a steel sheet is poor because its elongation is very low. For this reason, a method for cold forming of an ultra-high strength steel sheet is required. This paper describes how to improve the formability and weldability of the ultra-high strength steel sheet. Mechanical tests of this material were also performed to evaluate the welding properties of $CO_2$ (GMAW) and those of laser welding.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Technology of Plasticity Conference
• /
• 2009.05a
• /
• pp.236-239
• /
• 2009

Cowl cross bar, a component of automotive cockpit module, has been manufactured by using welding processes of several tube parts with different diameters. However, in order to reduce costs and increase the quality, it is required to develop a new production method to manufacture the cowl cross bar as one-piece In this study, therefore, eliminating the welding process, tube drawing process which is one of metal forming processes was designed by using combined drawing technique. In addition, the selectable range of area reduction ratio was defined as a design guideline and the designed process sequence was verified by finite element analysis.

• Textile Coloration and Finishing
• /
• v.35 no.1
• /
• pp.29-41
• /
• 2023

This study is about a hybrid lightweight cowl crossbeam structure with high rigidity and ability to absorb collision energy to support the cockpit module, which is an automobile interior part, and to absorb energy during a collision. It is a manufacturing process in which composite material bracket parts are inserted and injected into existing steel bars. When considering the mounting condition of a vehicle, the optimization of the fastening condition of the two parts and the mechanical properties of the composite material is acting as an important factor. Therefore, this study is about a composite material having a volume content of Polyamide(PA) and Glass Fiber used as a composite material for a composite material-metal hybrid cowl crossbeam. As a result of analyzing the physical properties of the PA/GF composite material, experimental data were obtained that can further enhance tensile strength and flexural strength by using PA66 rather than PA6 used as a base material for the composite material. And based on this, it contributed to securing the advantage of lightening by using high-stiffness composite material by improving the high disadvantage of the weight of the cowl crossbeam material, which was made only of existing metal materials.

• Transactions of Materials Processing
• /
• v.25 no.5
• /
• pp.332-337
• /
• 2016

The automobile cowl cross bar which is a backbone frame part holding electrical and air conditioning components inside the cockpit module has been designed with more complex geometries recently due to demands of its enhanced functions and reduced weight of frame parts. The traditional manufacturing process using welding between tubes with different diameters shows several problems such as poor mechanical characteristics and appearance, etc. Therefore, in this study, one-piece manufacturing processes which can eliminate the welding process were developed by applying the rotary swaging process. CAE analyses were conducted to examine the feasibility of the process and prototypes were manufactured by using a rotary swaging machine with 4 split rotating dies and 12 head rollers. Bending tests of the manufactured prototypes confirmed that the rotary swaging process gives better mechanical properties comparing with the conventional processes.

• Journal of the Korea Convergence Society
• /
• v.8 no.12
• /
• pp.275-281
• /
• 2017

The automobile cowl cross bar which is a backbone frame part inside the cockpit module has been designed with more complex geometries recently due to demands of its enhanced functions and reduced weight of car. The traditional manufacturing process using welding between tubes with different diameters shows several problems such as poor mechanical characteristics and appearance, etc. Therefore, in this study, manufacturing processes which can eliminate the welding process were developed by applying one-piece metal forming processes such as tube drawing and radial swaging. As results, it was found that the one-piece manufacturing processes give better bending strength than the traditional welding process and the swaging process shows the lowest manufacturing cost.

• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
• /
• v.36 no.5
• /
• pp.377-383
• /
• 2011

This study proposed the new method of discerning the assembled parts and presuming the position of central point in a Cowl Cross Bar (CCB) using a Charge-Couple Device (CCD) camera attached to a robot in the auto assembly line. Three control points of an ellipse were decided by three reference points, which were equally distanced. The radii of these reference points were determined by the size of the object, and the repeated presumption secured the precise determination. The comparison of the central point of ellipse presumed by Randomized Hough Transform (RHT) with the part information stored in a database was used for determining the faulty part in an assembly. The method proposed in this study was applied for the real-time inspection of elliptical parts, such as bolt, nut hole and so on, connected to a CCB using a CCD camera. The findings of this study showed that the precise decision on whether the parts are inferior or not can be made irrespective of the lighting condition of industrial site and the noises of the surface of the part. In addition, the defect decision on the individual elliptic parts assembled in a CCB showed more than 98% accuracy within a 500-millisecond period at most.

• Composites Research
• /
• v.33 no.6
• /
• pp.360-364
• /
• 2020

Although research and development of existing steel-made Cowl Cross Member(CCM) was carried out with magnesium and plastic to make vehicles lighter, it is difficult to apply them to performance problems in the vehicle's mounting condition. Recently, the company is conducting research on the injection CCM of the composite insert as a lightweight component that is most suitable for mass-production of automotive parts. This is a manufacturing process that inserts composite injection bracket parts into aluminum bar, and the adhesion of the two parts is one of the important factors considering the vehicle's mounting conditions. In this study, the joint strength of Aluminum bar is one of the important factors as a study for the injection of aluminum bar into PA6-GF60 composite material. For the analysis of these research, the method of spraying adhesive to the aluminum bar and the case of knurling treatment have been analyzed and the bonding strength of the direction of rotation and lateral direction has been analyzed for each part between the aluminum bar of the cowl cross member and the shape of the injection component of composite materials.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering Conference
• /
• 2001.05a
• /
• pp.571-576
• /
• 2001

Hydroforming, the new production technology, has been used to manufacture many parts of vehicle in the recent auto industry. When Hydroforming is applied, it is possible to make parts simplification and flexible alteration of section shape in many advantages such as weight reduction, number of parts reduction or performance improvement. This research into shape optimization which reduces number of parts and weight maintaining performance was achieved. In this paper, the COWL CROSS BAA and MT'g BAKT parts of A car STEERING support SYSTEM was introduced by using Hydroforming.