汽车铝应用手册_AAM_car-body-introduction_0.pdfVIP

Applications – Car Body Introduction The Body in White (BIW), seen as a single component, is the heaviest part of a conventional car with a share between 25 and 30% of the complete vehicle weight, depending on the size of the engine, the installed options, and the integrated safety features. In the European market, the dominating car body design concept is the monocoque design. Less than 5 % of the light vehicles built in Europe use a body-on-frame design. The car body − comprising the body-in-white, the closures, the bumpers and different interior parts − is today still a domain of steel sheet materials. However, the substitution of steel by aluminium in the car body presents most interesting lightweighting possibilities. Moreover, the options for lightweighting with aluminium are not limited to material substitution, but the different aluminium product forms offer in addition the potential for lightweighting by design and – to a limited amount – also lightweighting by using new fabrication technologies. It has been demonstrated that substitution of conventional steel car body designs by proper aluminium designs offers a weight reduction potential of the order of 40%. Short history Historically, aluminium applications in automobile bodies have been around for a long time. A small sports car with an aluminum body was already shown at the international motor car exhibition in Berlin in 1899. In the beginning, aluminium body components were produced by casting. As an example, in the model Great Arrow introduced in 1904 by Pierce-Arrow, large aluminium castings were used for body parts such as the side walls, the doors and the wall separating the engine from the passenger compartment. . Pierce-Arrow Great Arrow (1904) with cast aluminium body panels In the 1920ies, cast aluminium body panels were partly replaced by aluminium sheet panels, although window mouldings, firewalls, and other parts remained aluminium castings. Also other