Lightweighting

Spectrum Materials Engineering LLC also has extensive experience with lightweighting. This experience includes not only the materials engineering side, but the geometrical design side as well. This has led to the publication of papers, university level lectures and a book chapter. Specific areas of expertise include:

Materials design to maximize strength and stiffness to density ratios
Topology, topometry, topography and shape optimization
Efficient joint design
Numerical optimization and design space search algorithms

Mid-Spectrum design concept for an automotive body-in-white

Process for using structural optimization tools to reduce the mass of an automotive body-in-white

Spring semester 2020 lectures at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology:

Published articles about lightweighting:

D.M. Baskin, “The Automotive Body Lightweighting Design Philosophy,” Chapter 4 in “Lightweight Composites Structures in Transport: Design, Manufacture, Analysis and Performance,” edited by James Njuguna, Woodhead Publishing, Cambridge, England, 2016

D.M. Baskin, D.B. Reed, T.N. Seel, et al, “A Case Study in Structural Optimization of an Automotive Body-in-White Design,” SAE Paper# 2008-01-0880, Presented at the 2008 Society of Automotive Engineers Annual International Congress, Detroit, Michigan, April 2008.

D.M. Baskin, S. Dinda, and T.S. Moore, “A Simple Approach to Selecting Automotive Body-in-White Primary-Structural Materials,” SAE Paper# 2002-01-2050, 2002.

D.M. Baskin, “A Perspective on Future Automotive Chassis Component Materials,” Materials Technologies, 15(4), p. 290-295, 2000.