Development and optimisation of overall structure for premium motorbike

The task

A premium motor­bike manu­fac­turer commis­sioned us to opti­mise the basic concept of the frame including add-on parts such as fork, head­stock frame and rear swingarm with regard to weight. At the same time, chal­lenging spec­i­fi­ca­tions regarding the stiff­ness of the entire vehicle had to be adhered to in order to be able to esti­mate the driving behav­iour as best as possible in advance. It was also very impor­tant to design the opti­mised struc­ture in such a way that it could not only be manu­fac­tured as a series part, but could also be produced econom­i­cally.

The chal­lenges and solu­tions in detail

• The entire assembly was broken down into indi­vidual compo­nents and then opti­mised with regard to their indi­vidual require­ments. In the process, methods such as para­metric lami­nate opti­mi­sa­tion and topology opti­mi­sa­tion were used.
• For example, a weight saving of up to 40% was achieved for the control head frame. The stiff­ness was only reduced by 10% in compar­ison to the previous steel construc­tion. Thus the target was target was achieved.
• These chal­lenging condi­tions were exac­er­bated by the fact that the manu­fac­turing process was not allowed to change.
• The project was success­fully handled thanks to our skills in composite light­weight design with a special focus on para­metric opti­mi­sa­tion, as well as the topology opti­mi­sa­tion of load-bearing struc­tures. Equally helpful was our knowl­edge in produc­tion plan­ning.

Our know-how

The following compe­tences at ar engi­neers led to success in this project:

• Handling complex projects with a flex­ible team
• Topology opti­mi­sa­tion using advanced algo­rithms
• Creation of reduced order models by means of DOE (Design of Exper­i­ments) to effi­ciently inves­ti­gate response trends and para­meter depen­den­cies
• Para­meter iden­ti­fi­ca­tion and opti­mi­sa­tion of desired prop­er­ties
• Vali­da­tion of the opti­mised struc­ture using FEM
• Transfer of the results into econom­i­cally manu­fac­turable compo­nents

Our way

In complex projects, we recog­nise the possi­bil­i­ties of opti­mising indi­vidual assem­blies and compo­nents. It is espe­cially impor­tant to opti­mise their respec­tive influ­ence on the overall perfor­mance and thus to improve each compo­nent in the global context of the assembly. Always keeping in mind that all of these compo­nents must be econom­i­cally manu­fac­turable.