Sport car space-frame chassis design in view of weight reduction

Road vehicle homologation has become more and more challenging due to the introduction of stringent regulations regarding pollutant emissions. In order to fulfil these requirements, the focus in automotive industry mainly settled on the improvement of the engine performance in terms of fuel consumption. Another design approach aims at the vehicle lightening, yet in the respect of the safety standards. In the present work a methodology for preliminary space-frame chassis design for rear-central engine sport cars is proposed. The purpose is to design a chassis able to attain given performance goals in view of weight reduction. The design problem is faced using finite element analysis. The chassis numerical model is made of shell elements and is split into three sub-models: front, central, and rear. This allows the parallelization of the work among different teams. The sub-models undergo topometry and size optimizations in order to asses the optimal shell thickness distribution.