Structural adhesives are popular in the automotive industry as they can significantly benefit global stiffness but also other design attributes such as crashworthiness. It can be challenging to optimally locate the position and distribution of structural adhesives and is often implemented by engineering knowledge or legacy practices. The new HyperWorks Adhesive workflow provides a quick and efficient way to create models that can then - via OptiStruct topology optimization – be used as early conceptual guidance for adhesive placement. The Adhesive workflow automatically identifies flanges from the selected entities and creates a voxel design space with the appropriate design variables. The voxels are connected to the structural parts with TIE contact. The TIE contact has additional rules to ensure that only the voxel design space to structure is connected, never structure to structure.

The use case shown in the video demonstrates the use of structural adhesives to benefit global torsion stiffness. The new Adhesive workflow can reduce the mass of the structural adhesive while maintaining or improving performance benefits.