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Durability of automotive structures is a primary engineering consideration that is evaluated during a vehicle's design and development. In addition, it is a basic expectation of consumers, who demand ever-increasing levels of quality and dependability. Automakers have developed corporate requirements for vehicle system durability which must be met before a products is delivered to the customer. To provide early predictions of vehicle durability, prior to the construction and testing of prototypes, it is necessary to predict the forces generated in the vehicle structure due to road inputs. This paper describes an application of the “virtual proving ground” approach for vehicle durability load prediction for a vehicle on proving ground road surfaces. Correlation of the results of such a series of simulations will be described, and the modeling and simulation requirements to provide accurate simulations will be presented.

This paper presents a fundamental conceptual change to the traditional CAE based fatigue analysis process. Traditional approaches take the responses from a stress solver and these are then transferred into a secondary fatigue analysis step. In this way fatigue is, and always has been, treated as a post processing step. The new conceptual change described in this paper involves combining the two separate tasks into one (stress and fatigue together). This results in a simple, elegant and more powerful Durability Management concept. This new process requires no large data files to be transferred, no complicated file management and it is likely that whole fatigue calculation process can be done in memory. This makes it possible to perform optimization with fatigue life as the constraint. It also facilitates full body fatigue life calculations, including dynamic behavior, for much larger models than was previously possible.