Mr Artur Tarasek, Durability CAE, NIO
NIO's mission is to shape a joyful lifestyle by offering smart, premium electric vehicles and providing the best user experience through technological innovation, smart design and freedom of worry-free journeys. NIO was founded in November 2014 as a global electric vehicle company, with world-class research and development, design and manufacturing centres in China, the United States, Germany and the UK.
NIO, as a start-up company, has a unique opportunity to re-think what the user’s experience of owning an electric vehicle should feel like which is reflected in the product design and engineering. Nevertheless, being a relatively new company creates some challenges as NIO might not have the luxury of having legacy data and processes that more established OEMs possess which was the motivation for the CAE capability enhancement discussed here.
Modern, lightweight vehicle manufacturers require a wide range of joining technologies to provide a mass-efficient and cost-efficient product that withstands the variable loading that the structure is exposed to during the life of the vehicle. Given the ease and speed with which the resistance spot welding process can be automated, it is a primary joining process in high-volume steel vehicle manufacturing.
Due to the complex loading that the joint might be exposed to it is important to understand the failure modes that might occur during extensive vehicle testing and develop a suitable durability prediction technique to avoid costly, late design changes.
A significant amount of joining configurations in the modern vehicle’s car body requires an approach that will provide good quality data with a reduced scope of testing. Good practices and challenges associated with creating a resistance spot weld’s durability prediction methodology will be discussed.