A Novel Manufacturing Process of Lightweight Automotive Seats: Integration of Additive Manufacturing and Reinforced Polymer Composite

Lightweight automotive seats offermultiple benefits to original equipment manufacturers in terms of cost savings from various aspects, including less material usage, more integrated processes, and compliance with Corporate Average Fuel Economy Standards. Original equipment manufacturers have been focusing on innovative ways toproducelight weightautomotive seats. The commercially available automotive seats are currently made of multiple metal components combined through welding and fasteners. The use of additive manufacturing andcomposite structures is particularly useful for light weighting the automotive components. Additive manufacturing (AM) offers multiple advantages over traditional manufacturing processes such as freedom of design thereby enabling complex structural geometries, mass customization and waste minimization, and control over the fiber alignment through deposition in a predetermined pattern.Combining metal inserts with polymer composites through a novel manufacturing process allows design of lightweight and high-performance materials for automotive components. However, fabricating these metal polymer composite structures through traditional manufacturing processes limits their mechanical properties due to limited design freedom, lack of control over fiber orientation in composite parts, and poor interfacial bonding between the constituent materials. It is essential to develop a novel manufacturing process to enable high throughput production of lightweight automotive seats using metal and polymer composites. As such it is important to design the automotive seatsuitable for manufacturing viathis process and perform mechanical characterization on varioussubcomponents of the seat to ensure that the design and performance requirements provided by the auto manufacturer are met. The aim of this project is to develop a novel manufacturing technique to produce lightweight automotive seat by combining AM with conventional manufacturing processes. The car seat back panel will be designed via topology optimization and numerical simulations to minimize the overall weight while ensuring it meets all the performance requirements. The optimization of the seat back structure will be based on computational stress analysis to maximize the stiffness and minimize the weight. Materials currentlyused by Ford Motor Company will be adopted for a few subcomponents while the in-house composite materials will be used for the rest of the seat back. The composite and metallic materials will be tested to determinetheir mechanical properties as these are necessary for simulations. A novel manufacturing process will be developed to integrateAM metal inserts with discontinuous reinforced composite through large scale additive manufacturing and compression overmolding processes. The developed manufacturing technique will be used to fabricated various subcomponents suitable for the seat back design and mechanically tested to determine their properties. The manufacturing of the lightweight seat back design through this process involves integratedAM metal inserts with the composite structure forrecliner connection. The manufacturing of the entire seat back which is lightweight through the novel manufacturing process will be discussed. The performance of the designed seat back will be investigated through numerical simulations and shown to meet all the requirements provided by the auto manufacturer. The final goal of developing a novel manufacturing process for lightweight automotive seats is met through designoptimization of seat back,manufacturing of subcomponents, mechanical characterization, and validation through numerical simulations. The routes to achieve the final goal of the project and the depth in which they were investigated changed throughout the project due to personnel changes and the COVID-19 pandemic. The project resulted in the development of a novel manufacturing process to integrate metal inserts with tailored polymer composite preforms through overmolding. Leveraging this proven manufacturing process, a lightweight seat back was designed through topology optimization and numerical simulations. The designed seat back uses AM metal inserts and compression overmolding of tailored polymer composite preforms obtained via large scale additive manufacturing. The metal polymer composite 2| P a g estructures fabricated through this process exhibited enhancement in stiffness and improved ductility upon testing. Overall, the project provided an alternativedesign and manufacturing technique for automotive seat back that enables weight saving while meeting the safety and performance requirements.