Laboratory exercise Bodywork and vehicle design:

The teaching here is primarily concerned with the design of vehicles. The work undertaken focuses on the dimensional concept, the vehicle layout and the package of whole vehicles taking into account assemblies and the ergonomics of the interior as well as all statutory constraints.The important vehicle-specific foundations and methodological approaches are taught and worked out as individual exercises and group work within project tasks with the aid of virtual development tools such as CATIA V5, Siemens NX, RAMSIS, CAVA, LS-Dyna and Ansys.The heart of the Bodywork Development Laboratory is the Karosserie (Bodywork) Forum, which is equipped with a PC pool of 20 workstations. Guided by experienced professors and assistants, the students learn to operate the above-mentioned tools, which in their entirety correspond to the current application standards of the German automotive industry.

Laboratory exercise Styling:

To enable students to become more familiar with the design techniques used in the design process and their backgrounds, the Styling course presents individual aspects from the viewpoint of the designer before students elaborate on them in groups. This is done using design techniques such as rendering, the creation of tapes or clay modelling. After the shape description has been specified in more detail using the manual techniques, students have the opportunity to undertake the digital post-processing of the styling sketches with CAS (Computer Aided Styling). They use the CAS tool Alias from Autodesk for this.

Virtual reality (VR) laboratory exercise:

Students can analyse and assess their design and styling data from CAD and CAS systems on a Powerwall installed in the laboratory. The real-three-dimensional presentation on a scale of 1:1 provides very efficient access to the data and facilitates understanding when discussing engineering design and shape-specific issues.
Comparable systems, usually called Virtual Reality Systems - abbreviated to VR systems - are nowadays an inherent part of the bodywork development process of all large automotive companies. Students can already gain experiences in handling these new media in the VR laboratory with the ICIDO VR software.

Rapid prototyping laboratory exercise:

To get rapidly from digital 3D models to physical components, students can use their design data to build a physical model out of strong ABS plastic with the aid of a 3-D plotter from Stratasys, Inc. which uses the FDM method (Fused Deposition Modelling).