• Transactions of the Korean Society of Machine Tool Engineers
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• v.17 no.5
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• pp.10-22
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• 2008

In an automotive body structure, a design configuration that fulfills structural requirements such as deflection, stiffness and strength is necessary for structural design and is composed of various components. The integrated design is used to obtain a minimum weight structure with optimal or feasible performance based on conflicting constraints and boundaries. The mechanical design must begin with the definition of one or more concepts for structure and specification requirements in a given application environment. Structural optimization is then introduced as an integral part of the product design and used to yield a superior design to the conventional linear one. Although finite element analysis has been firmly established and extensively used in the past, geometric and material nonlinear analyses have also received considerable attention over the past decades. Also, nonlinear analysis may be useful in the area of structural designs where instability phenomena can include critical design criteria such as plastic strain and residual deformation. This proposed approach can be used for complicated structural analysis for an integrated design process with the nonlinear feasible local flexibilities between system and subsystems.