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When a vehicle with a partially filled fuel tank undergoes sudden acceleration, braking, turning or pitching motion, fuel sloshing is experienced. It is important to establish a CAE methodology to accurately predict slosh phenomenon. Fuel slosh can lead to many failure modes such as noise, erroneous fuel indication, irregular fuel supply at low fuel level and durability issues caused by high impact forces on tank surface and internal parts. This paper summarizes activities carried out by the fuel system team at Ford Motor Company to develop and validate such CAE methodology. In particular two methods are discussed here. The first method is Volume Of Fluid (VOF) based incompressible multiphase Eulerian transient CAE method. The CFD solvers used here are Star CD and Star CCM+. The second method incorporates Fluid-Structure interaction (FSI) using Arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian (ALE) formulation.

Plastics injection molds are typically subjected to a combination of loadings such as injection pressure, temperature changes, clamping force, and potential interference at seal-off surfaces during manufacturing process. The loadings on the molds are as cyclic as the injection molding cycles. As a result, the molds could fail either in material overstraining or fatigue. In this paper, several failure cases will be presented, along with the FEA stress and fatigue analysis results, to demonstrate the effect of the above mentioned loadings on the mold structural integrity. This paper will also show how the FEA stress and fatigue analyses were effectively employed to determine the mold failure root cause and assist the design modification in a usually constrained time frame.