The 20th Annual Congress of China Foundry Association

Abstract: Traditional automotive body designs involved over 100s of individual parts, resulting in significant manufacturing, transportation, and assembly challenges. Manufacturing requires individual treatment of parts from product to process designs with expensive tooling. Manufacturing & transportation contributes to significant environmental footprints - which is important to reduce to achieve sustainability. Additionally, assembly often led to out-of-tolerance distortions, necessitating rework late in the process.

Multi-process sub-assemblies successfully replaced by Audi, via structural castings 2 decades ago, have been improvised to mega/giga castings by Tesla in recent years. Several other OEMs have already invested and are on their way to creating these integrated assemblies via giga castings, also supporting the electrification trend, which requires mass reduction to offset the weight of battery. The die-casting machine manufacturers have enabled this disruption, by developing giga presses, which are now 2x to 3x that of the largest DCMs available during the last decade.

While the promise of GigaCastings is enticing, there are major challenges to execute them successfully. Since they are an important part of the body structure, dimensional control and crashworthiness are important for assembly and product performance (in-service). In pursuit of excellence, virtual prototyping becomes essential.

ESI’s casting simulation software ProCAST aids in elevating the quality of cast components in an environment where new kinds of parts are being produced on large die-casting machines, posing new challenges of product design & process control, through the different sequences of manufacturing processes. The effect of manufacturing processes also impacts the crash behavior. The presentation shall also highlight potential main influencers from the casting process on crashworthiness and compare simulation results in ESI VPS with/ without the effect of manufacturing on crash tests.

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