Topology Optimization of Electric Vehicle Chassis with Porous Frames and Feature-Deformable Batteries

This paper presents an electric vehicle (EV) chassis conceptual design approach of optimizing porous load-bearing frames and distributed Li-ion batteries of different sizes and shapes concurrently. A local volume constraint is imposed on the chassis frames to design the topologies of porous patterns for enhancing the robustness w.r.t. battery distortion or overload acceleration induced by crashing loads. The geometry of the batteries are defined by leveraging a series of numerical operations containing deformable feature description, union Boolean and gradient norm. By solving the proposed topology optimization model, an EV chassis with porous frames and various-features batteries are obtained, which exhibits better mechanical properties in not only static bending stiffness but also transient crashworthiness compared with the baseline design with orthogonal frames and given batteries. Numerical examples of different porosity values are discussed to show the conflict between the battery distortion and the overload acceleration which requires users to choose a suitable porosity for designing chassis frames in the conceptual design process.