Principal Engineer, Mahindra & Mahindra
Sairam Peddi is currently working at Mahindra & Mahindra as Principal Engineer--Vehicle Crash, Safety & Multidisciplinary Optimization (MDO) and previously worked as Senior Lead Engineer at General Motors and CAE Analyst at TATA JOHNSON CONTROLS. He has 17+ years of experience in automotive product development, CAE, crash, occupant safety, durability, NVH, optimization, MDO, test correlation etc. with a strong theoretical background of FEA concepts. He holds a Masters Degree from Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi in the field of study - Design of Mechanical Equipment.
Speeches
Multidisciplinary Design Optimization (MDO) is gaining importance in the design and development of automotive structures in order to achieve optimized performance on the key vehicle attributes, Crashworthiness, Durability and NVH, while minimizing the overall weight. With regard to the application of MDO in the design and development phase, it is necessary to perform MDO multiple times, starting from the concept to the final confirmation of the design before CAD release for Proto build. The ESTECO optimization tools (mode FRONTIER) & technologies are extensively used in Mahindra to perform MDO at various phases of the vehicle development. Mahindra uses optimization driven design strategy in its new product development process which consists of three phases of MDO. In the first phase, Design Space Optimization, a design space volume is identified based on the initial vehicle architectural considerations and a Multi-Disciplinary Topology Optimization is performed to generate the optimal load paths. In the Second phase of design exploration, the results of topology optimization are used to construct parametric FE Models and MDO is performed to optimize the section, geometry & packaging of critical member positions. The optimized sections/geometry obtained from second phase, are taken as inputs in third phase of detailed design, where in gauges & grades of structural components are optimized. This presentation gives summary of Mahindra’s approach towards application of MDO for Simulation driven design Strategy, with several case studies as examples. The challenges of performing MDO for launched vehicles are also highlighted in this presentation.